New Beginning

MY COUNTRY--Russell W. Davenport -- Simon and Schuster ($1.50).

One night last month some 40 people gathered in the large, old-fashioned pent house apartment of Mrs. Hugh Bullock in Manhattan for the most trying occasion in the literary life -- a poetry reading. They were publishers, editors, critics, poets, a few patrons of poetry. They heard the first formal reading of the first poem in many years by Russell Wheeler Daven port, 45, onetime FORTUNE managing editor, best known as the close associate of the late Wendell Willkie in the Presidential campaign of 1940. Davenport began:

America is not a land of ease. We have not paused from action to beget Heroic simile and song and frieze; We have no empire of the mind as yet, Nor have we shed our light within the grave; But, as the sons of enterprise and sweat, Honor the quick, the strong, the free, the brave -- The mind whose thoughts are cradled in the hand -- The fierce emancipators of the slave Exacting destiny of virgin land. We are the builders of dynamic things, Successors to the spires of Samarkand -- Boilers and bars, propellers, wheels and wings To run and fly and dive at our behest, Through which the mighty wind of freedom sings. America is not a land of rest. . . .

Davenport held his audience closely, through the 62 printed pages of My Country

: . . . And if there is some magic in our land, As on Darien surmised; Some distant purpose hidden in the hand Some ultimate fulfillment of the free . . . It is that there incarnates in the beast A Spirit native to the universe, Which by our signature we have released, Beyond recall, from human custody. . . . Strong men these are, whose hearts can never rest; Forever ending, only to begin; Forever moving on the trackless quest Of what forever is, yet cannot be: Forever turned to face the arduous West-- The dream of progress to infinity -- The eternal destination of the free.

The third section of the poem was addressed to a dead American soldier:

Who among us will speak for this man, Who will say what there is to be said?

It begins with the arrival of the telegram:

"When Pop got the telegram he didn't know what to do. . . ."

(This passage, like three others in the poem, is written in colloquial prose.)

On the shore where the stiff white crosses mark a design for eternity, And the infantry of sleep is forever enrolled in silence, And the lives of men are but numbers, and an alien wind Comes up to the beaches, caressing The fallen sons of men of a distant country: Here, at last, the meaning and truth of freedom Opens, unsealed, before the eyes of the nations; . . . Here in the name of freedom all have been gathered Into the perfect union of purposes disunited-- A brotherhood of men in the arms of death Who were never aware, in life, that they were brothers . . . Open these graves to discover The secret of liberty shoveled under the earth : Behind the curtain of flesh, as under the crosses, There is one Brother of all; and all are One.

Bright, but secret, Brother of mankind, Whom we imagined in the reckless void; Here in the broken bodies of our sons We see at last what was invisible-- The remaining hope that animates the world, The brotherhood of all men, everywhere.

Whatever verdict time and the critics might place on My Country, there was no question but that it was immediately effective on its first hearers. It was also full of resonance, and even its more awkward, elocutionary passages had the ring of sincerity. It made its deepest impression as an attempt to bring poetry back to the general understanding of Americans, to make its language that of the commonalty of citizens.

Simon and Schuster printed a first edition of 10,000 copies of My Country and gave Author Davenport a $1,000 advance. The publishers apparently believed, with some reason, that My Country was likely to become the John Brown's Body of 1944.

The Author. Born in South Bethlehem, Pa., the son of a vice president of Bethlehem Steel Corp., Russell Wheeler ("Mitch") Davenport wrote poetry for ten years before entering journalism, wrote none for 14 years afterwards. He went to Thacher School in California, twice won the Croix de guerre in World War I. Back in the U.S. he went to Yale, where he published poems in the Lit. He is married to Novelist Marcia Davenport (The Valley of Decision), daughter of the late soprano Alma Gluck.

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