Dior ripostes with a nice black wool afternoon dress that has folds over the shoulders and a big black velvet bow across the base of the square neck; the skirt, which comes to within ten inches of the floor, achieves fullness with a pleated back panel. For daytime, he takes a navy wool dress, adds a conventional belt and a tiny white piqué collar with ends that knot at the throat, and uses very full pleating below the hips. Another excellent day dress by Dior is a slickly fitted black crêpe affair that buttons down the back almost to the hem and has a high, round neck. A little mustard shantung gilet, tying in back, can be worn over it; taken straight, it’s our old friend the “good, basic black.” When Dior gets eccentric, however, he does it thoroughly. Listen carefully; this won’t take long. An evening dress of a purplish tie silk has a black sash wrapped a little above the waist of a top that is all loose folds, and the skirt is wide at the hips but looks hobbled at the ankles in front. The back of the skirt, which is floor-length, has a free-swinging panel that begins fairly far up. The model walks, the panel sways, the legs are revealed to a truly startling extent. No comment.
The Bergdorf show, as a whole, provides healthy competition for American designers, but not enough to make them despairingly turn tail and abandon the delights of custom designing for the safe-and-sane refuge of ready-to-wear.
AUGUST 21, 1948
Custom has established the right of every generation to shock the one preceding it, if possible, but this is not always as easy as it looks. The plight of the current college girl, attempting to startle parents who survived the Scott Fitzgerald era, is a case in point, and pitiable indeed. In recent years, the young things have been trying to assert themselves by running around in attire resembling that of underprivileged serfs under the Hapsburgs, but their elders have taken it all with discouraging calm, and present indications are that the whole act has therefore lost its savor. Certainly the college clothes being shown right now are considerably less bulky and bedraggled than they have been for some time.
Not that there aren’t still some eccentricities. These occur, mostly, where you’d least expect them—in pants. Knickerbockers, gone underground these several years, are with us again, presumably to the delight of girls who have to find comfort in the notion that any leg is enhanced by wearing them. Macy has some that are only moderately full, and come in green, red, or gray corduroy, with notched waistbands and zippers down the backs; $9.34. The same shop has plaid wool plus fours, with elastic across the back of the waist and a fastening down one hip; $8.94. Bonwit Teller show Calfeze, which are slacks that end a few inches above the ankle, cost $14.95, and are made of corduroy in colors like cinnamon, sage, cypress green, and deep mauve. Altman, even more unorthodox, is presenting Spat-slacks—tapering slacks of rainbow tweed that wind up looking like spats over the instep and are held there by a strap under the arch; $22.95. Believing that most women should stick to skirts and that even the rare ones with Hepburn figures shouldn’t venture beyond conventional slacks, I can’t say that I thrill to such innovations, but on the other hand my readers can’t say that they are not kept informed on vital issues.
As to other vital issues, the news is good. Skirts tend to be flat over the hips, with fullness front and back; collars are cut to be worn either very high or thrown open so that they lie wide on the shoulders; Victorian styles continue. Lots of calico and quilting are to be found, and also fabrics that resemble baranduki (Russian for chipmunk) and ocelot fur. Ensembles are everywhere, and the beloved classic gray flannels and sweaters are on hand as usual. The highlights that follow are generally on the gay side and should suit gadabout working girls as well as campus belles.
A NOTE BY DAN CHIASSON
The poems in The New Yorker have a relationship to the page something like that of the cartoons, breaking the even, downward drift of the prose and suggesting, as the cartoons do, a distinct set of conventions for capturing reality. In the first part of the twentieth century, those conventions were completely overhauled, in ways that we are still sorting out. By around 1940, the modernism of Pound and Eliot had been mostly absorbed, though both of them very arguably had their best work before them: Pound’s Pisan Cantos of 1948 and Eliot’s Four Quartets, first published as a book in 1943. Yeats had died in 1939 after an astounding late period. The branch modernisms, exemplified by Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and others, were misunderstood, if they were known at all (Frost was considered a lightweight; it would be years before his tragic vision was acknowledged); W. H. Auden, who called the decade “the age of anxiety,” though deeply impressed by Eliot, had struck the new tone of engaged sophistication with a Marxist edge. Various homegrown avant-gardes were devised, all of them cool to the touch, each one isolating this or that strain of modernism; George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, and others founded the Objectivist Press in the early thirties, taking the innovations of William Carlos Williams (“No ideas but in things!”) to their farthest frontier. Upstarts had begun to stir: Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop were writing the poems that went into their first books, to be published in 1944 and 1946, respectively.
That’s a lot of activity to keep track of, but readers of The New Yorker were spared the trouble for most of the thirties, when light and occasional verse by the likes of Phyllis McGinley and Virginia Woods Bellamy filled its pages. Ogden Nash and E. B. White, whose later work appears in our selections here, were frequent standouts among the legions of wags whose poems appealed to The New Yorker reader’s taste and refinement, like the ads that ran alongside them for gin or haberdashery. Serious poems had no friend in Harold Ross, who had fought Katherine White for years over whether poetry, as opposed to verse, ought to run in his magazine. It was always an uphill battle, as Ben Yagoda writes in About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, and Ross nearly cut poetry entirely in 1937. He backed down in response to a memo from White, but he effectively washed his hands of poetry by delegating it to others, first to William Maxwell and then, in 1939, to Charles A. (Cap) Pierce, who became the magazine’s first designated poetry editor, serving until Howard Moss took over in 1950.
The poems we include here were all published under Pierce, who did three crucial things: he made it right with great poets the magazine had neglected or ignored, like William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes; he found poems that had something to say about the war; and he made discoveries, Elizabeth Bishop foremost among them. Bishop contributed eight poems in the forties, half of them before she had published a book. That fact alone locates The New Yorker near the center of American poetry in the decade.
By 1940, the war was an incontrovertible fact, and, surprisingly, as Yagoda argues, the poems in the magazine took the lead in facing it. The war crops up even in poems nominally about other things. In a piece of old-fashioned embroidery, E. B. White’s “Home Song,” we come suddenly upon “the soldier’s destination / The sick man’s ward, the wife’s plantation.” The poem deepens in ways that its significant surface charm belies. In Randall Jarrell’s little verse fable, “The Blind Sheep,” the sheep, when he hears from the surgeon owl that the world “goes as it went ere you were blinded,” decides he’d rather stay blind than “witness that enormity” of worldly strife and suffering. Almost a year before Pearl Harbor, The New Yorker ran Louis MacNeice’s “Barroom Matins,” whose final stanzas shatter us by their untelegraphed directness. The poem concludes:
Die the soldiers, die the Jews,
And all the breadless homeless queues.
Give us this day our daily news.
Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen” mentions “the war” only once, but the entire poem (among Auden’s most famous and most anthologized) functions as a protest against the forces that make “Modern Man” just a number, his death, as MacNeice puts it, “a drop of water in the sea / A journalist’s commodity.” Poetry, Pound once wrote, is “news that stays news”; as such, it casts a skeptical eye on “our daily news.” (That rhyme with “Jews” is astounding: MacNeice seems to h
ave divined, before the magazine’s political columnists, where the persecution of Jews was headed.)
These poems measure their own power against the sham claims and rhetoric of institutions, a comparison that is always implicit in poems but breaks to the surface in times of conflict. Langston Hughes’s “Sunday-Morning Prophecy” undermines that thieving preacher by its own setting up of his sermon like a piece of theatre. Howard Nemerov pits poetry’s means of education against “The Triumph of Education,” which, bursting one bubble after another, makes reasonable, modern robots out of the young. Everywhere in these poems we find attacks on the dulling, abstracting, and standardizing forces of modern life, which signals (in Malcolm Cowley’s poem) “The End of the World” not by bombing cities but by stifling romantic love:
Not havoc from the skies, death underfoot,
The farmhouse gutted, or the massacred city,
But the very nice couple retired on their savings,
The weeded garden, the loveless bed.
Against this backdrop, poems that take pains with observation or measure precisely the fluctuations of mood seem anything but slight. They offer what Frost said all poems offer: “small stays against confusion.” This is precisely what Richard Wilbur gives in an early poem, “Year’s End,” when he describes “the death of ferns” and other flora and sounds of winter: “Barrages of applause / Come muffled from a buried radio.” Cowley’s “The End of the World” has become, in Wilbur’s elegant poem, plural and renewable: “the sudden ends of time” brought annually by wind and snow.
Wilbur was a great describer at a time when precise description played a role in proving anew what John Keats called “the holiness of the Heart’s affections.” The New Yorker began, in the forties, a relationship with another great describer that lasted her entire life: Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop’s poems are, it would seem, all description; readers of the magazine could find in her the same kind of demonstrably “good writing” they found in the prose. Meticulous, apt, vivid, Bishop would seem to suggest that to be great, poems needed to exemplify only these traits. Who can forget the “big fish tubs…lined with layers of beautiful herring scales” in “At the Fishhouses” or, in “The Bight,” the water “the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.” But in these poems the details always give way to humor, to tenderness, to wonder. Her poems calmly wait for the enchantment to strike, as when, in “At the Fishhouses,” the old fisherman first “accepts a Lucky Strike,” then delivers one, disclosing, between the lines, that “He was a friend of my grandfather.” Or the way that, in “The Bight” (to which Bishop appended the subtitle “On My Birthday”), the envelopes on her writing desk magically turn into “little white boats…piled up / against each other,” resembling, amazingly, “torn-open, unanswered letters.” It is as though things have to be laundered in the imagination to become fully real. This is precisely the trade practiced in her own “Bight,” the sublime “activity” that Bishop, staring down another year, labels, unforgettably, “awful but cheerful.” Bishop’s birthday gift to herself was also a sublime gift to the magazine and its readers.
Home is the place where the queer things are:
Hope and compassion and objets d’art.
Home is the centre of mind and of liver,
Under the hill and beside the river.
Home is the strangest of common places,
Drenched with the light of familiar faces.
Here are the leavings of last night’s table,
Gloom and gaiety, stoop and gable.
Home is the proving ground of sanity,
Brick and ember, love and vanity,
Paper and string and the carpet sweeper,
And the still form of the late sleeper.
Book and clock, and a plant to water,
Mother of Jesus, son and daughter.
Home is the ink and the dream and the well;
Home is the incompatibles’ hell.
Home is the depot of coming and going,
The last kiss, the first snowing.
Home is the soldier’s destination,
The sick man’s ward, the wife’s plantation.
Home is the place where the queer things are:
Hope and compassion and objets d’art.
Home is the pattern and shell of slumber,
Home is a gleam and a telephone number.
Ever at home are the mice in hiding,
Dust and trash, and the truth abiding.
Dark is the secret of home’s hall closet—
Home’s a disorderly safe deposit.
Home is the part of our life that’s arable,
Home is a pledge, a plan, and a parable.
Ever before us is home’s immensity,
Always within us its sheer intensity.
—E. B. White
February 5, 1944
TO
SOCIAL SECURITY ACCOUNT NUMBER 067–01–9818
THIS MARBLE MONUMENT IS ERECTED BY THE STATE
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the war, till the day he retired
He worked in one factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors, Inc.,
Yet was neither a scab nor odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues
(Our report on his Union says it was sound),
And our Social Psychology workers found
He was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day,
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And a certificate shows that he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producer’s Research and High Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantage of the Installment Plan,
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man—
A victrola, a radio, a car, and a frigidaire.
Our investigators into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which, our eugenist says, was the right number for a parent of his generation,
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd;
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
—W. H. Auden
January 6, 1940
In May, approaching the city, I
saw men fishing in the backwash
between the slips, where at the time
no ship lay. But though I stood
watching long enough, I didn’t see
one of them catch anything
more than quietness, to the formal
rhythms of casting—that slow dance.
—William Carlos Williams
May 18, 1940
Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
>
I watch a beacon swing
From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass
Mist deepens on the pane;
We rush into a rain
That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night
To see the land I love.
—Theodore Roethke
June 8, 1940
Popcorn, peanuts, clams, and gum—
We whose Kingdom has not come
Have mouths like men but still are dumb,
Who only deal with Here and Now
As circumstances may allow;
The sponsored program tells us how.
And yet the preachers tell the pews
What man misuses God can use:
Give us this day our daily news
That we may hear behind the brain
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 69
