First Person

First Person is a lavishly printed and quite excellent little journal of "Travel, Memoirs & Humor" whose first issue is at present on the Cambridge newsstands. Its contents are diverse, but its odd collocation of themes comes as a refreshing exception to the formalism of the contents of many American magazines, from the little reviews to the Saturday Evening Post.

The magazine boasts short selections from the personal writings of distinguished men: Thornton Wilder, Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, Ford Madox Ford. These pieces are all interesting, but they have all been published before and were presumably included primarily to fill out the table of contents, and perhaps to help set the tone of the publication.

The prose pieces of real merit are reminiscences (both true and "untrue") by lesser known writers, Anne Halley, Robert, Hellman, Diana Athill. Miss Halley's piece, a really magnificent sketch, recalls her life (or the life of her herine) as a child in Nazi Germany before the Second World War. When the Nazis ascend to power her family leaves for America.

Life in this country is only described in passing ("the tricky proliferation of America: an unfolding maze of Saturday movies, roller skating rinks, picnic grounds, church ladies, colored people...") but the beginning of the story has already indicated what effect it has had upon her parents: "They use paper napkins instead of the linen, rolled up in napkin rings; they like Pepperidge Farm bread and even Jello." The tale is, on a number of counts very sad, Miss Halley's prose is rich and evocative, and the story's exquisite construction succeeds in delaying the point until the very end.

The two other reminiscences, while not as good as Miss Halley's story, have their own particular and considerable virtues. Robert Hellman's In the Country is another tale which contrasts the old country (in this case Russia) with the new. The New York couples on a country hillside listen patiently while Boris, a slightly eccentric friend, tells of an odd experience his father had in Russia. The story is obviously an important one both for Boris and for his dead father, and the American friends listen with kind patience, but with no comprehension.

Miss Athill's tale concerns an English woman in Jugoslavia, who has some interesting observations about the now-aging first generation of Jugloslav Communists.

Much of the other writing in First Person is quite good, but, as far as I am concerned, the most important segment of the entire issue is not prose at all, but the remarkable drawing of Edward Gorey. Mr. Gorey is one of the great geniuses of our time, and it would be deplorable that his ineffable abilities were so little known if it weren't that the beauty of his work is increased by one's realization of its total obscurity. Some may recall that Gorey designs covers for Anchor Books, but his actual magnificence is only to be found in such master-works as the Object Lesson, the Doubtful Guest, and the incomparable Listing Attic, which is now out of print. Anyone who aspires to any sort of real gentility needs must purchase First Person, if only for the Gorey pictures, as two-fifths of the world's Gorey-lovers (a roommate and a particularly jolly friend) have already done.