Shantih, Shantih, Shantih

Has the Reader Any Rights Before the Bar of Literature?

There is a new kind of literature abroad in the land, whose only obvious fault is that no one can understand if. Last year there appeared a gigantic volume entitled Ulysses, by James Joyce. To the uninitiated it appeared that Mr. Joyce had taken some half million assorted words-- many such as are not ordinarily heard in reputable circles--shaken them up in a colossal hat, laid them end to end. To those in on the secret the result represented the greatest achievement of modern letters--a new idea in novels.

The Dial has awarded its $2,000 prize for the best poem of 1922 to an opus entitled The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot. Burton Rascoe, of The New York Tribune, hails it as incomparably great. Edmund Wilson, Jr., of Vanity Fair, is no less enthusiastic in praise of it. So is J. Middleton Murry, British critic.

Here are the last eight lines of The Waste Land:

"London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s'accose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam ceu chelidon -- O swallow swallow

Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then He fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata

" Shantih Shantih Shantih"

The case for the defense, as presented by the admirers of Messrs. Eliot, Joyce, et al., runs something like this:

Literature is self-expression. It is up to the reader to extract the meaning, not up to the writer to offer it. If the author writes everything that pops into his head--or that is supposed to pop into the head of a given character--that is all that should be asked. Lucidity is no part of the auctorial task.

It is rumored that The Waste Land was written as a hoax. Several of its supporters explain that that is immaterial, literature being concerned not with intentions but results.

A dozen books to have read: Ann Severn and the Fieldings (Sinclair) Babbitt (Lewis); Black Oxen (Atherton); The Bright Shawl; (Hergesheimer); The Cathedral (Walpole); The Enchanted April (Elizabeth); Jurgen (Cabell); Last Poems (Housman); The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page (Hendrick); Many Marriages (Anderson); Some Distinguished Americans (O'Higgins); Where the Blue Begins (Morley).