“Literature is not enough,” said the precocious
New Zealand short story writer Katherine
Mansfield to her brilliant editor of the New Age
journal, Alfred Orage, who fled the literary scene
in London to study the sly man’s teaching at
his Institute for the Harmonious Development
of Man in Fontainebleau, France, digging a ditch
and filling it up again to break the hypnotic
hold that his mind had over him and create his
own immortal soul, praising the sly man’s teaching
as “sublime common sense.” But—and there is
always a but with these unorthodox ways! —after
years of translating the sly man’s gobbledygook
book “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson,” he
returned to London to edit his new journal, The
New English Weekly, publishing Dylan Thomas’s
first published poem, “And Death Shall Have No
Dominion,” in the May 18th, 1933 issue,
coming
full circle back to Literature again, which was
never enough to satisfy the longing in his soul for
wholeness and completeness; and poor old Alfred
Orage died in his sleep of heart failure.
No comments:
Post a Comment