By James Ballowe
In separate portraits of James and Dorothy apparently taken when James was about 20 and Dorothy in her mid-teens, the siblings look strikingly alike. But James’s pronounced eyebrows accenting cool Germanic good looks do not translate well to Dorothy. She sits stiffly in a flowered dress, her hair close-cropped, her eyes dark and brooding. She seems not to know what to do with her thick arms and wrists. As she became a woman she grew heavier. And increasingly she lived in her brother’s shadow.
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Decker’s taste in poetry was eclectic. But his literary quarterlies had already convinced critics and poets alike that he could discern quality in poetry and knew how to package it. One of his more interesting early books was Howard Nutt’s sardonic Special Laughter. In Chicago Nutt had become a friend of Richard Wright, whose introduction to Special Laughter refers to Nutt’s poems as being those of “a Yankee grown wary, conscious, and knowing, yet still casual, loitering, terse of speech, and, like a Mark Twain of the Twentieth Century, retaining the traditional manly reticence by camouflaging the horrible truth.” Special Laughter advanced the press’s reputation as a serious place for poetry. Conrad Aiken wrote in the New Republic that he found Nutt’s book to be “effortless contemporary, naughty, full of glee . . . a quite admirable and sinister poetry.”
Other books published in 1940 bear names of authors still known to poetry readers. Kenneth Patchen introduced Harvey Breit’s Record of an Unfinished Journey. Decker issued Rae Baemish’s American Signatures for the Black Faun Press and Hubert Creekmore’s Personal Sun for the Village Press, imprints he never used again. Marks Upon a Stone by Jane Dransfield, a member of Ford Madox Ford’s Paris circle, indicates that the press was gaining recognition outside the United States. And Clark Mills, who was to have three of his own books of poetry published by Decker, translated Stephane Mallarme’s Herodiade.
The writing Decker published provides an astonishing index to World War II poetry styles, ranging from the safely traditional to the most daring experiments. While his fellow townsmen and the country were praising Decker for having published such lines from Masters as these from “Channahan Locks”:
Have their confluences, where there
or Nomina sunt consequentia rerum,
