This post is a follow up on THIS series.
Let me set the scene. Kenyon Review minions Grant Johnson, Kate Kremer, and myself stumbled into the basement of KR’s regal yet tasteful headquarters one sunny afternoon, to find stack after stack of eras-old magazines. We commenced to comb through them, as anyone would. We split up the decades, we sprawled out on the carpeted floor, Kate broke a desktop computer (temporarily), we took breaks only for pie and Robyn music videos, and we got down to business.
I took the 1940‘s.
Immediate sparks that caught my eye? Contributions from Robert Penn Warren, Patrick McDonagh, John Berryman, Hannah Arendt, Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, Bertolt Brecht, Randall Jarrell, Federico Garcia Lorca, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Ford Madox Ford, William Barrett, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. To name the short list. The 1940’s weren’t messing around.
Maybe it was the fire in the air back then. In the second issue of 1945, thick in the wake of WWII, Brecht wrote as an intro to his “Poems of Exile,” that “herewith I send you a few words as if they were flushed out, here and there, by bloody faces from the foliage and over the sound. Handle those that reach you with care! Yellowed books, crumbling reports are what I depend on. If we meet once more, I shall gladly begin all over again.”
The images in these yellowed pages are explosive, but hopeful– more fireworks than bombs. Or maybe they are bombs, but bombs the way a child might try to see them, violent but also a strange, wild magic. Mark Van Doren wrote, in “How We Shine,” that “We do brighten bravely. Inward, outward, is the beam defined, and not a soul but has received it sweetly,” for the second issue of 1943. These issues of the 1940’s, it seems, are shell shocked, blood soaked, and accustomed to pinching every penny out of their words.
In the introduction to the second issue of 1948, W.H. Auden wrote that “one drawback, and not the least, of practicing any art is that it becomes very difficult to enjoy the works of one’s fellow artists, living or dead, simply for their own sakes.” My only real response to that is to look at Dylan Thomas’s “Poem,” published in the third-ever issue of the Review, in 1939. “Rest beyond choice in the dust-appointed grain, ” he tells us. “At the breast stored with seas. No return through the waves of the fat streets nor the skeleton’s thin ways. The grave and my calm body are shut to your coming as stone, and the endless beginning of prodigies suffers open.”
I’m digging your style, 1940’s. Keep it coming and we just may have our winner yet.