Another World 1897-1917 (review)

268 biography Vol. 2, No. 3 to the same issue of Poetry. 2) a quote from Elinor's extremely cagey and oblique review of The Waste Land. Frost: He stayed at Amy Lowell 's house, and Elinor may have met him at dinner. Once. Ralph Hodgson: "Not since I discovered Ralph Hodgson have I had such happiness in a new volume of poems." Edna Millay to Elinor Wylie. Dr. Olson ventures a rare literary judgment in the next sentence: "Ralph Hodgson, while so startling to Edna Millay, failed to make the slightest intrusion on the history of poetry." Perhaps one should be grateful that Dr. Olson withholds so much analysis, but why not withhold the entire book? And there, friends, with the exception of "Shelley , fascination with," as it is indexed, you have the references to poets. Oh, there is the usual mob of literary mediocrities of the Twenties , who took themselves, and each other, so seriously, and who, unlike Ralph Hodgson, have virtually disappeared without a trace. Why resurrect them? One final word: The New York Times Book Reviewer says that "the strength of this book is Stanley Olson's prose." The book has no strengths that are visible to me. And the prose is execrable. Reader beware! Carolyn Kizer Berkeley, California Anthony Eden, Another World 1897-1917. New York: Doubleday, 1977. 175 pp. $7.95. It may be the horror of our century's events, or the slackness of its prose, which causes most modern statesmen's memoirs to sink, under their own weight, with scarcely a trace left behind. But Lord Avon's last book is much more likely to stay afloat. Written not long before his death early last year, Another World (which reviews the first twenty years of the life much more fully chronicled in four other volumes, including Full Circle and Facing the Dictators) is a shy, slight, almost apologetic afterthought. The author is going over private rather than public ground now, and he is not altogether sure of the course. But his hesitancy proves part of his book's charm and worth. He tells us of his childhood at "Windlestone" in County Durham— the photographs show it to be a house somewhat larger than the art museums of most major cities—under a gentle, beautiful mother (ad- reviews 269 mired in a quoted stream of Edwardian thank-you notes from, among others, the poet and novelist George Moore and the painter Walter Sickert) and a diffident but discerning father who painted and collected pictures. Around the author were also a lovely older sister, some good fellows for brothers, worthy servants and tutors, and only the most tame and occasional "ruction" to upset an idyllic life that "all seemed so permanent; the same family had been established at this site for four centuries. Why should it end in any of our lifetimes? . . . [I]n the summer of 1911, none of us had an inkling of the holocaust to come." This extinguished world is evoked with a charming , embarrassed vagueness; Eden's exposition of chronology and background where personal and family history are concerned is appealingly slack. We get, instead of chronicle, moments and sketches. The author's career at Eton, except as it pertains to training for the war, merits a single paragraph; an earlier incident with a pony gets two. The memories are quiet, anti-climactic, even ghostly. Anyone familiar with Siegfried Sassoons' autobiography (the actual one, not the Sherston memoirs) will recognize this way of putting forth the past. It is infuriating and compelling. Then the holocaust. Lord Avon was a Platoon Leader, Adjutant and Brigade Major in a service career that stretched from before the horrific Somme campaign past the Armistice. He tells his story in the same calm manner in which he tells the story of his world before 1914. He is not "literary": the world of the trenches does not become "unreal" or "absurd" when held against the world he knew. The world of war is simply a bad world, different from the unquestioned good one he left behind. It was perhaps this sturdy lack of imagination which led the leaders of Europe into the Great War, but that...