Bring Out Your Dead

Braithwaite’s Death-Cart

The Poetry Review of America, edited by William Stanley Braithwaite, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The plague being upon us—God knows whence it came—the plague being upon us, poisoning men and women, and turning them into minor and sub-minor poets, and catching some in their youth so that they can never become men and women—the plague being upon us, I suppose there must be men brave enough to fashion death-carts for the corpses. It is a sanitary precaution. The more carts the better. The builders should be commended; the drivers medalled and ultimately pensioned. We should not bother much about the wheels—how they bang and rattle. Let the corpses leer and quarrel. But keep the carts well burdened and speed them to the pyres of oblivion.

This is not criticism, but the exaggeration of bitterness; and you, Mr. Braithwaite, should not complain if our lips writhe back at the cup which you have held out to us and if our tongues are twisted to a sincerity that sounds like malice. When Contemporary Verse issued from Philadelphia like an ancient tumbril reconstructed by children we laughed and said, “God speed you while you last.” But when rumors came of a new poetry magazine in Boston we waited with the wonderful hope of eager youth. Ah, the new Poetry Review! The new Poetry Review! And what have you done? You have given us the old doll without even new tinsel. Do you wonder that I would smash your doll and tear its frayed and tawdry clothing?

“To serve the art we all love,” you say. Does Benjamin R. C. Low serve it with sentimental buncombe like Jack O’Dreams? Does Amelia Josephine Burr serve it with a library tragedy like Vengeance? And you, Mr. Braithwaite, do you serve it by writing a muddled article on The Substance of Poetry? The bad grammar and proofreading can be forgiven, but who can cleave his way through the jungle of incoherent thought? And I may add seriously that Mr. Edwin F. Edgett, with his puerile remarks about Shakespeare, sounds very much like your younger brother.

There is the beginning of service in the competently written criticisms by Messrs. Untermeyer, O’Brien and Colum, and especially in the tantalizing quotations in fine print from Donald Evan’s new book Two Deaths in the Bronx. Amy Lowell contributes a short story in her recent colloquial vein and Sara Teasdale a sincere lyric.

If live men and women have been sand-bagged and put in the death-cart, let them awake and revive the corpses of their companions. Let them turn the cart into a tally-ho and gallop on with daring and exuberance, cracking a whip at critics.

I do not know your age, Mr. Braithwaite, but I feel that I have the wisdom of greater youth. You have not quite killed hope in me, for I know your true devotion to your work. What will you give us in the forthcoming numbers of your magazine?

Mitchell Dawson.

Herbert Tree’s “Merchant of Venice”

Could I invent some acid, bitter-stinging speech, some new tongue far beyond English in sharpness, I might begin to describe the spectacle of incredible vulgarity—of miserable intent and culmination—which is to be viewed upon the New Amsterdam stage this month. English shrinks—becomes the prattled language of babes—at thought of it.

Is the great wind which has blown the dust from the theatres of Germany, bearing Craig and Reinhart and Barker upon its back, echoing even here in America, to be completely discounted, silenced, by this vulgarian, this soulless, thoughtless, casual, shambling buffoon?

To The Merchant of Venice—a rambling, untidy comedy at best, a play for reading, or only to be played by a man of genius—he brings a graceless cast, a marvelous pot-pourri of music (tom-toms for “Morrocco” and Spanish jingles for “Arragon”), a quite distended and “improved” version of the original play, himself (God save us), and a theory of decoration quite incomprehensibly fearful. Brown palaces shaking to the conversation of the players—brown palaces with hangings of decayed green, a sham, paper Venice, elaborately stenciled, a Portia in landlady’s pink, a Jessica (a spirited Cockney girl) in Turkish costume, roysterers garbed with all the delicate art of Timbuctoo, a Shylock in old dressing gown. No detail, no fragment of the picture of vulgarity is lacking—from red-plush curtains to modern rattle-jacks for the Carnival, from mouthed speeches to maudlin groupings—a complete whole.

This to an apparently delighted audience, to a receptive press.

Barker departed from America, a semi-success, embittered towards us. The Weavers, finely played and brilliantly produced, clung to the shadow of an audience at the Garden Theatre, got as far as Chicago and failed completely there. The two great things in the theatre of the past year trodden out of sight of the easy public at the absurd and dolorous prancing, at the loud cajoling of popularity of bourgeois neighbor Tree.

How long is the theatre to cling to ragged precedent; to these mournful gentlemen of a dusty yesterday, raving through their paper and lattice Venices, showing us their entrail-colored Belmonts, barring sun and light and poetry and singing from the song-starved people of America?

Rollo Peters.