Transformation. Edited by Stepan Schunanski and Henry Treece. (Gollancz. 6s.)
—War -Time Harvest. Selected by Stefan Schunanski and Henry Treece. (Staples. 3s. 6d.)
EVERYONE interested in contemporary literature should be grateful to those untiring editors whose collections and miscellanies enable young writers (especially those in the Forces) to find their public. Mr. Treece's and Schunanski's books are not up to the standard of John Lehmann's Penguin New Writing, but their existence at all is an excellent sign. One of their contributors' most irritating faults is to attack the writers of the 'thirties, whose work they seldom better and by whose technique many of the poets seem to have been influenced. None of the so-called "New Apocalypse" poets write better or more moving poems than Auden, unless Dylan Thomas is to be counted amongst them, and he, of course, was already publishing in 1935, if not earlier. What could be more like the most dreary aspect of the 'thirties than the beginning of War- Time Harvest, stuffed with little articles on " Art and Politics" and " Art and Democracy "? However, there are good poems by Alun Lewis and Nicholas Moore. In Transformation, Alexander !Kok writes an interesting account of the Decline of Humanism, and there is a memorable story by Boris Pastemak, in some ways remini- scent of Tolstoy's studies of his own youth.
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