New Road 1943. Edited by Alex Comfort and John Bayliss.
(Grey
- Walls Press. 8s. 6d.)
THIS latest editorial progeny of M:. Comfort and his collaborator, Mr. Bayliss, requirzs no little effort from the conscientious reader who intends to read it all through. For those who know their way among the names there are some good things (from Comfort himself, Gascoyne, Moore, Watkins and others) ; but most of the best work has already appeared elsewhere, and this is not surprising when we learn from the editorial acknowledgment that the con- tributors arz unpaid, though the price of the book does not seem to justify this. The opening essay (Derek Stanford's "New Landscape ") is a shocking piece of bad writing and pretentious nonsense. The book contains criticism, essays, poems, reproductions and a so-called surrealist section, and may be' taken as representa- tive only of a limited section of those writers and artists who fall roughly between the,ages of 20 to 30 years. The best thing in it is Mr. Orwell's prose ; he writes of the Spanish War, and every- thing he says is relevant today and is as unpalatable to the Left as to the Right.
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