Gentle Host

GUEST BOOK--Witter Bynner--Knopf ($1.50).

Among U. S. literary groups, the writers who have settled in New Mexico have a reputation for being the most humorless of the lot. But in Witter Bynner New Mexico can claim at least one poet who knows and appreciates a joke, and who has the distinction of being the author of a major literary hoax. In 1916 when U. S. excitement over free verse, imagism, vorticism, and other strange movements was red hot. Author Bynner, in collaboration with Arthur Davison Ficke, dashed off a few nonsensical poems, signed them with a pseudonym, "Emanuel Morgan," declared them expressions of a new esthetic principle called spectrum. While the real identity of the author was carefully concealed critics and poets gravely debated the merits of this bogus verse and school, argued solemnly whether Poet Emanuel Morgan was a genius or a fraud. In Guest Book Author Bynner again reveals his keen eye for literary and other pretensions, his delight in exposing them with wit and a minimum of malice. Less frankly humorous than his verse play, Cake, less grave than his contemplative Eden Tree, Guest Book nevertheless contains several sprightly amusing poems, several that strike a deep note of sadness and concern. Hospitable and urbane, Author Bynner has among his 70 guests a Communist and a patriot, a liar, a painter, a hostess, a debutante, a bachelor, maintains the same good manners, the same ironic detachment toward all. A depthless scorn is revealed only for the poetess who "would have ordered God from the front door if he had come in clothes that meant the back." Literary detectives may believe they recognize originals like Amy Lowell and D. H. Lawrence in Author Bynner's portraits, may think they have spotted Robinson Jeffers as Jeremiah:

He sets his masonry upon the brink Of lamentation, out of his window peers Toward waves that ever rise only to

sink Confused and lost as he among his years.

But Host Bynner protects most of his guests, gives few specific characteristics by which they could be identified. In his amused description of the liberal-- A handsome profile, an artistic tog And just enough of capitalistic

plunder,-- And a graceful siding with the underdog, Although he may not know which dog

is under--

Author Bynner sets the tone of his Guest Book, but in such poems as Liar and Oats he sums up complex careers and relationships in a few concise lines, drops many a casual, oldfashioned, epigrammatic observation. In Widower he finds lovely symbols and lines to express his favorite theme of loneliness:

Week after week night would come back

again: The fading footfall and the silent

heaven,

A universe unfriendlier than when She had made its wideness intimate;

now even His hand seemed far. There was no

more of her Beside him than of fire when it goes.

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