Rereading the Classics (Firbank)

 

drawing by Augustus John

References in parentheses indicate page numbers in the Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd. Edition of The Complete Ronald Firbank (1961) with a preface by Anthony Powell.  The title is not altogether accurate as The New Rythum and other pieces was published the following year by Quartet Books and The Early Firbank (also from Quartet) in 1991.  My essay, however, cites only passages from in the first of these volumes, with figures in parentheses indicating page numbers.  Those in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

 

     In my first semester as a university freshman in the fall of 1963, barely seventeen years old, I chose Ronald Firbank as the subject of my research paper.  As I recall, my professor thought well of my writing, but felt constrained to note among her comments, “I fear your enthusiasm is misplaced.”  She doubtless had a point.  I believe my retelling of anecdotes of the author’s extravagant eccentricities may have occupied nearly as many words as my callow literary criticism [2], but, upon recently rereading Firbank, I find my admiration for his writing undimmed. 

     He remains one of a kind in spite of affinities to Wilde, Saki, and Norman Douglas [1].  The usual concerns of fiction-writers for character, plot, and description play little role in his works.  His characters are almost all of a piece.  None has individuality; none indeed is sufficiently complex to suggest a developed personality.  And all these strikingly similar people go about doing virtually nothing.  They spend all their time in talk, mostly in the idlest of gossip.  Firbank’s novels are scarcely narratives at all.  Action means nothing.  As one of his characters asks, “What does it matter – the plot?” (347)  The reader finds only the limpest excuse for a narrative arc, the meagerest gesture toward incident.  Though lyric lines sometimes describe nature or costume, the scene is always luminous and unreal, a fairyland no reader could mistake for lived experience. 

     The words do, however, convey themes, attitudes, and suggestions about lived experience.  Firbank’s focus is always on pose and style, and this very emphasis alone makes a definitive point about his sensibility.  Given the strains and inadequacies of everyday life that make his characters weary and languid, they can only, he seems to say, retreat into a defensive stance, ironic and clinging to humor and sex and aesthetic judgements as the only dependable elements in a generally tiresome world.  They are forever engaged in conversation (though often enough they pay little attention to each other), and thus his works are almost entirely dialogue.  Their words, laid down like a mosaic or, to be more contemporary, a bricolage, define over and over again, the same perspective, as though there were nothing whatever more to be said.

     Though some development is traceable from Odette d'Antrevernes to The Artificial Princess,  Firbank’s basic attitude, the posture he assumes, changes little.  Thus, in the following discussion no distinction is made of one work from another; all references will be to page numbers of The Complete Ronald Firbank [3] rather than to specific novels. 

     Firbank does, in a playful manner, include several self-referential passages.  He calls himself a hothouse flower, “a dingy lilac blossom of rarity untold,” beautiful, though dirty, and quite anomalous   (631).  A similar mixture of praise and criticism is suggested by the description of Vainglory, parodied as Vaindreams: “odd spelling, brilliant and vicious”(199), similarly suggesting an impressive yet somehow sinful strangeness.  Hs habitual lack of narrative, the likeness of his many characters, and their avoidance of emotional appeal are highlighted in the description: “He has such a strange, peculiar style.  His work calls to mind a frieze with figures of varying heights trotting all the same way.  If one should by chance turn about it’s usually merely to stare or to sneer or to make a grimace.  Only occasionally his figures care to beckon.  And they seldom really touch.”  (199)

     His disdain for what is natural may owe something to Oscar Wilde who declared “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.”  To Firbank captive nightingales are altogether superior to wild ones (57), and, after all, “Nature . . . can produce dew but it takes Art to make tears” (65).  Even peoples’ temperaments may be quite artificial (82).  Thus his texts tend to turn from much of observed reality, preferring references to art, to paintings, costume, coiffures, and poems. 

     The many mentions of works of art indicate how Firbank conceived his own project.  There are no less than eight references to Salomé, the theme of Wilde’s play and Beardsley’s illustrations [6].  Doubtless Firbank was drawn to the story’s combination of perverse sexuality, violence, and Christian lore.  There are references as well to the Symbolist Maeterlinck (87), to Verlaine, author of Les Poètes maudits (125), and to Sappho, including a poem based on her “Ode to Aphrodite” (81, 93).

     The first work in The Complete Ronald Firbank is subtitled A Fairy Tale for Weary People, and surely the dominant note in the Firbankian fantasyland is ennui, languor, lassitude.  (Perhaps the best single word is acedia – Firbank always relished a word off the beaten path, and he would have appreciated the notion that so serious a sin could be committed with so little effort.)  

     Firbank repeatedly uses forms of the word “weary” itself.  As their conversations maunder and they ponder how to pass their time, one lady remarks that another looks “very weary” (263).  The topic of travel suggests a volume titled Notes on the Tedium of Places – “comprising almost everywhere” (264).  But there seems to be a grace, a sort of charm, a sweetness in the Weltschmerz.   A lady is described as “beautifully weary” (110)  Alarmingly, though, the beautiful can metamorphose rapidly into weariness (69).  A character whose “weariness exceeds most things” promulgates a philosophy called Indifferentism, with the central teaching being “not to care” (273).  Firbank’s royal courts even include a noble with the title “his Weariness” (not to mention “her Gaudiness,” “her Dreaminess,” “his Naughtiness” and “Lady Listless” [95] [499-500] and [531]).  In his world even “butterflies loitered” and “flowers languished” (43).

     This terminal fatigue recalls Villiers de l'Isle-Adam’s Axel who notoriously declared “Live? Our servants will do that for us.”  It arises in the very sensitive (those afflicted with “hyperaesthesia with complications” [660]) reacting to “Life, the saddest thing of all” (556).  His characters find themselves “attached first to one thing and then another, without ever being attached to any” (535).  Each is “like a loose leaf, tossed about the world” (153).  What, then, is to be done?  “Above, a sky so blue, so clear, so luminous seemed to cry out, ‘Nothing matters!  Why worry?  Be sanguine!  Amuse yourself!  Nothing matters!’” (520)

     Though such ennui cannot, perhaps, be overcome, the sufferer may be distracted.  One lady is “glad I can drug my senses with a book” (279), while another is somewhat vaguer: “We might frivol round together some evening if you like” (726).  Very often sexuality provides a stimulation, though in Firbank such comforts are generally voyeuristic or gay or savor of sado-masochism.  He is capable of slightly shocking even his own fictional creations.  “But this Ronald Firbank I can’t take to at all.  Valmouth!  Was there ever a novel more coarse?  I assure you I hadn’t gone very far when I had to put it down” (532).

     To Firbank oblique hints of impropriety are all that appear, but they are nonetheless salacious. In his version of the Caribbean, men walk the street “with fingers intermingled” (594).  With very little excuse Mrs. O’Brookmore says “It sounds like the Incest-music for some new opera” (256).  Lady Parvula de Panzoust (one might write a monograph on the names Firbank comes up with, as expressive and unlikely as Dickens’) enjoys having “her aphrodisiac elements nicely titillated” (454).   When she goes calling, she is told “’The mistress, I presume, is with the scourge’” (401)  An altar boy lad is “witching as eros” (693)  A “cherif” is “daily expecting a cargo of very young boys from Tunis.  He had amassed vast wealth, rumour had it, in the traffic of handsome youths” (479).  The widow Ruiz includes in the objets d’art of her boudoir “a masterly marble group, depicting a pair of amorous hermaphrodites amusing themselves” (612).

     References to dominance and submission occur regularly, though they provide atmosphere and tone rather than incident.  Thus Cardinal Pirelli muses over “a liqueur-glass of brandy,” ‘Jewel-boy.  Yum-yum’” (691) and preaches on the theme of Flagellation (693).  Msgr. Parr’s aides are “entrenched at the corner of Whip-me-Whop-me Street at Mrs. Cresswell’s old Flagellite’s Club” (138).  On e can only imagine what “the bwan-wam bwam-wams are up to, as they are described only as of “blanch-faced queens, youths of a certain life”; we are told it is  “more shocking than the shocks” (625, 627).  The potential “Vice-Consul at Sodom” must be chastised with a good spanking (538).  Miss Whipsina Peters, “the most resigned of women” (336) indulges  in a ménage à trois with the confidence that “un trio n’excite pas de soupçons.” (343)

     Mixing, perhaps at first uneasily, with such sensuality is Firbank’s obsession with the church.  He in fact converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of twenty-three, but his writing betrays not the slightest spiritual ambition though it repeatedly returns to religious topics [7].  The same Cardinal Pirelli mentioned above, who is addressed at times as “my queen” (651) found himself sufficiently idle that he decided to christen a “week-old police dog” with great ceremony (641).  A certain Pope Tertius “had the head of an elderly lady’s-maid” (657).  The average curate is described as “something between a eunuch and a snigger” (534).  “From the over-elaboration of his dress [Winsome Brookes] suggested  . . . a St. Sebastian with too many arrows” (84).  Upon hearing that “the marchioness will be birched tomorrow”  Mlle. De Nazianzi thinks “Oh, the charm, the flavour of the religious world!  Where  match it for interest or variety!” (553) and considers becoming a nun: “the impulse to take the veil had been strong with her – more, perhaps, to be near one of the nuns whom she had idolized than from any more immediate vocation” (516).  As the “impotent” church bells quarrel and complain Sarah Sinquier looks at the steeples and sees a devil (319).  Sister Ecclesia a full-blown hysteric who kicks and punches and draws blood with blows of a broomstick (428).  Religious topics rarely arise without a scent of sinful sexuality wafting about the scene. 

     Apart from sex and religion, Firbank finds a certain solace in thoughts of darker races.  Among their representatives are the redoubtable Miami Mouth of Prancing Nigger (the British title was the less transgressive Sorrow in Sunlight), “the widow Embarka (who was of negro extraction)” (482), and a doll called “Topolobango, Queen of the Sunset Isles” (306).  This theme, at roughly the same time as Parisian Negrophilia, appears in such references as the “dark children of the sun” (672) who appreciate “tuberose punctuated with inebriating jasmine” (672) and many of the occasional songs, including one in which the lover is praised as “like the Congo serpent” (323).  Blacks are shamelessly appropriated for the air of the exotic and of passion they lent his mise-en-scene. 

    These interests – the largely observational sexual antics, the Catholicism of incense and vestments and masochistic penitence, the tropical and sensual Blacks -- are all at bottom aesthetic.  Firbank and his admirers may be devotees of Madame Wetme’s religion, “her cruel God was the Chic: the God Chic” (518).  They may aspire to a sort of salvation if it may be said at the end, as it was of Mrs. Shamefoot “You adorn life.  You have not lived in vain” (179).  Yet Firbank does not fool himself; he does not deign to dodge mortality.  Even the life lived for beauty must conclude in tragedy.  Mrs. Thumbler declares of an acquaintance, “Poor man, in the end he became so decorative that he died” (186).  And the remedy is sometimes unequal to the complaint, no matter how extravagantly applied.  They “were, each in their own way, ready for” what is “too ornate” as they “go about, as other fools, in quest of pleasure,” usually finding “tedium”  instead (404), living in a state of “bored magnificence” (89).

     A writer’s writer, when backed into a corner, Firbank will play with words, allowing words alone to explode pyrotechnically, distracting his characters, himself, and susceptible readers.  All writers, of course, do special effects with words, that is what constitutes the aesthetic use of language, but Firbank seems often to vault over any implied reinforcement of meaning into the pure joy of babble, something like what speech sounds like to the pre-verbal infant or what that baby’s utterances sound like to the doting parents. 

     Most of the interpolated poetry privileges sound over sense, though concept may play a role [8].  We know only the title of the “folk-song of the Paralytics” and can only imagine the “pas of the Bare-footed Nuns” (95), but these verses that are included are typical.

 

A negress with a margaret once lolled frousting in the sun

Thinking of all the little things that she had left undone . . .

With a hey, hey, hey, hey, hi, hey ho!

                                                                  (511)

 

As an adult nursery rhyme this negress bears comparison to Slim Galliard’s “Flat foot floogie with a floy, floy” or the lyrics of Walt Kelly.  Similarly, the “Belle of Benares” begins somewhat intelligibly before it dissolves into gibberish that seems to suggest the obscene.

 

My other females all yellow, fair, or black,

To thy charms shall prostrate fall,

As every kind of elephant does

To the white elephant Buitenack.

And thou alone shalt have from me,

Jimminy, Gomminy, whee, whee, whee,

The Gomminy, Jimminy, whee!

                                                                 (342)

 

     Torrents of funny names sometimes burst onto the page, among them the Duchess of Netherland, Sir Gottlieb and Lady Gretel Teuton-Haven, Zillah Bottom, Almeria Goatpath, and Thisbe Brownjohn. [9]  Slightly absurd alliteration may enter at any moment: “The plaintive pizzicato of Madame Mimosa’s Pom pup ‘Plum Bun’ . . .” (431).  Disconnected snatches of conversation recall Cole Porter’s “Did You Evah” as they fade into his soundtrack:

 

“. . . As if I were no more than the wife of an Aide-de-camp!”                                                                    

“Above social littleness.”

“Those ‘Isolde’ cocktails make one very amorous.”

“Would you mind not hurting me with your fan?”

“Oh, be careful there, Countess, of some horses’ offal.”

I hear that your wife and my wife . . . but I fancy there’s nothing in it.”

                                                                                           (70-71)

 

“. . . above-board, when one can!

“ . . . Half the profits.”

“Ce gros Monsignor Parr!’

“ . . .A day together.”

“ . . . Rabbits.”

“As tall as Iss’y.”

                                                                                            (204)

 

“Once while beagling, accidentally – “

There came a murmur of voices.

“ . . .terrifying nightmare women.”

“ . . .One of his wild oats.”

“ . . . fascinating, fiendish colours.”

“It’s unmistakably his.”

“Pish!”

                                                                                              (232)

 

     At times Firbank resorts to Wildean inversion.  Thus plainness is a distinction (69), a fiasco is better than a success (111), a play would have had a longer run were it not so exquisite (85), and scaffolding enhances the cathedral (123).  A certain lady tells the truest lies, dear, of anyone I know!” (688)

     Often, however, his verbal play is expressed in singular images, odd and fascinating like the objects in  Joseph Cornell’s boxes.  Advertisements in the buses provide a readymade montage: “Stella Starcross – The Lady from the Sea – This evening, Betty Buttermilk and Company – Rose Tournesol – Mr. and Mrs. Mary’s Season: the Carmelite – The Shop Boy – Clemenza di Tito” (330).  Often, though, the strange, glowing images arrives singly.  Towers are like “the helmets of eunuch in carnival-time” (124).  The King complains, “Whenever I go out, I get “an impression of raised hats” (503).  A peach tastes “like a dark carnation” (225).  The Baroness is “all feathers and nerves” (38).

     It remains only to explain the broader attractiveness of this singular sensibility.  It is a locus classicus of high camp and thus subculturally meaningful for gays, but it possesses considerable, if not universal, crossover appeal.  Much derives from Firbank’s consistent humor; his comedy sparkles on every page, as if Norman Douglas or  Noel Coward were boiled down until they became not only intense, but also a bit weirder.  In fact, though their roots are in fin de siècle Aestheticism, Firbank’s characters face the abyss, the early twentieth century breakdown that led to Modernism and then Existentialism.  They believe in nothing, for all the Catholic folderol, and thus there is a sort of courage in their gossiping and posing and performing and sniffing after the salacious.  Whistling in the dark, they elaborate the most fabulous symphonic exercises and while away their time in the most human of pastimes, playing with words.

 

 

 

1.  Though, strictly speaking, the same could be said of every writer, even the most imitative.  See my essay from last month: “A Unique Oeuvre.”

2.  I will abstain from these anecdotes in this account, though, like Wilde, some of Firbank’s best art may have been in the incidents of his life.  Interested readers may consult the reminiscences of his friends, for instance in Ifan Kyrle Fletcher’s Ronald Firbank: A Memoir. With Personal Reminiscences by Lord Berners, Augustus John, V.B. Holland, and Osbert Sitwell or Firbankiana : being a collection of reminiscences of Ronald Firbank, edited by Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente.

3.  I append the table of contents from this volume so the specific novel from which each quotation comes may be easily determined. 

4.  From his “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.”

5.  See pages 32, 36, 67, 98, 150, 157, 666, and 754.

6.  While Beardsley notorious pictures appeared in the 1894 English edition of Salomé, the original French edition had a vignette by the equally erotic Félicien Rops (not made specifically for the book) depicting a wild sort of female sprite who apparently has not one but two fish tails as well as legs crouching over the remains of a meal with the slogan “non hic piscis omnium” (“the fish here is not for everyone”) which became the motto of the Librairie de l’Art Indépendant.

7.  The reader may be reminded of Wilde’s embrace of Catholic spirituality in De Profundis.

8.  Other songs with nonsense elements are found on pages 245, 265, 365, 511, and elsehere.

9.  See pages 380 and 441.

 

 

 

Table of Contents of The Complete Ronald Firbank

 

Odette: A Fairy Tale for Weary People                17

The Artificial Princess                                             27

Vainglory                                                                  75

Inclinations                                                             223

Caprice                                                                     319

Valmouth - A Romantic Novel                              387

Santal                                                                       479

The Flower Beneath The Foot                              499

Prancing Nigger                                                       593

Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli 645

The Princess Zoubaroff - A Comedy                      699

Hip Aesthetics

 

     During the twentieth century, several forms of ironic reception of art gained widespread popularity.  Though far from novel, they benefited from the erosion of generally accepted standards of beauty and the exile of many artworks to subcultures or elite audiences.  “Kitsch”  and “camp” have been widely studied [1], while another approach, of arguably equal importance – the hip – has been neglected.  Each involved adopting, temporarily at least, often as much for the fun of it as to reveal unsuspected value, a taste either not one’s own or, at any rate, comically exaggerated.  For kitsch is fundamentally the appreciation of the extremely vulgar products of mass culture, while for camp it is a caricature of a flamboyant gay style.  The hip celebrates a spirited counter-cultural reaction, often the contrary of social norms. 

     The category is used both for artworks and for lived experience bordering on art.  For instance Blake was hip to find Satan the hero of Paradise Lost as was Abbie Hoffman in honoring George Metesky, the “mad bomber.”  Each reaction is an ironic reversal of what might be expected.  People ordinarily seek fame; it was hip of Ted Joans to avoid it.  People seek affluence; to live self-sufficiently was a hip choice by Scott Nearing.  Critics think highly of literary craftsmanship, so Kerouac liked to give the impression that he wrote with a wholly “spontaneous bop prosody.”   

     The spirit of hip is counter-cultural, but the adversarial aspect of the concept is relatively recent.  The  deepest roots are in the notion that poets bring news from a divine realm, either the gods or an extraordinary imagination.  This concept is ancient [2], but in earlier eras the artist had been largely normative rather than challenging social norms.  With the Romantic movement of the end of the eighteenth century, however, and the celebration of the individual genius some in the arts assumed a more contrary posture.  The old patrons – the nobility and the church – lost importance, displaced by middle class consumers as the economic base of much aesthetic production.  With these changes came the avant-garde and contempt for the philistine: “il faut épater le bourgeois” [3].  Some artists since have particularly aimed at provocation, particularly in movements like Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism. 

     The etymology of the term hip is a vexed question.  Over fifty years ago David Dalby suggested that it was derived from the Wolof hipi (or xipi) meaning “with open eyes” [4].  Numerous other alternatives have been suggested including earlier slang derived from hypochondriac, people with the surname Hepp, the wearing of hipboots, associations with hip-flask or with the posture of opium smoking, but a definitive answer remains elusive.  Dalby’s idea has at least the virtue of reinforcing the primary semantic import of the term.

     Whatever the ultimate origin of the word, the current usage has always suggested superior knowledge.  That is the meaning in the word’s first written appearance as slang, a definition in the “Modern Slang Glossary” published in the Cincinnati Enquirer [5] in which “hept” is defined as “to get wise or next.”  The following year Tad Dorgan used the word for several names in a cartoon and it appeared as well in George V. Hobart’s 1904 novel Jim Hickey: A Story of One-Night Stands in which an African American character says, “Say Danny, at this rate it’ll take about 629 shows to get us to Jersey City, are you hip?”  By the ‘thirties, the term was widely used among Blacks, particularly among musicians, and appeared in Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary with the definition “a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive.”  The expression was adopted as well as among white people who valued Black culture.  In his Autobiography Malcolm X describes the importance of jive talk in establishing hip credentials in Harlem as well as the appearance of whites who affected it in seeking to be more “Negro than the Negroes” [6]

     Among these white hipsters were musicians and drug-takers, some of whom, like Mezz Mezzrow, had lifelong contact with African-American culture.  Others were further toward the fringes, fans of jazz or marijuana, including artists and intellectuals, some of whom, like Kenneth Rexroth and Norman Mailer, contributed to a theory of hipness during the ‘fifties.

     Kenneth Rexroth, the poet, critic, and translator whose character is described in Dharma Bums as the “father of the Frisco poetry scene,” the organizer the historic Six Gallery reading, cites Lipton and emphasizes even in the title of his essay “Disengagement: the Art of the Beat Generation” [7] the “disaffiliation, alienation, and rejection of the young.”  The movement is thus for him less a protest than a simple opting out.  While condemning “the utter nihilism of the emptied-out hipster,” he asserts that “It is impossible for an artist to remain true to himself as a man, let alone an artist, and work within the context of this society.”  Neither Howl nor On the Road had yet been published; Rexroth’s examples of hip artists are Charlie Parker and Dylan Thomas. 

     Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” [8] proved even more influential.  He, too, stresses the hip person’s disaffection: “one is a rebel or one conforms,” “one is Hip or one is Square,” but he is more willing than the scholarly Rexroth to admit the petty criminal or addict under the title of “the American existentialist, the hipster,” a spiritual adventurer who explores “uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”  Though the more edgy, even sinister, aspects of hip culture faded, late 1950s pop culture figures like Del Close’s Geets Romo (on How to Speak Hip) and Jules Feiffer’s Huey, foil for the nebbishy Bernard in The Explainers (1960), remind us to what an extent the inarticulate, perhaps dangerous, youth played in the hip identity during the 1950s.  The same decade that saw the popularization of the Beats was fascinated as well by juvenile delinquency. 

     Some critics in the literary world offered as skewed a view as comedy albums and comic strips.  Norman Podhoretz wrote one of the fiercest denunciations of the Beat writers [9], associating them with youth crime (“young savages in leather jackets”).  Their work “can easily spill over into brutality” since for them ”kicking someone in the teeth or sticking a knife between his ribs are deeds to be admired.”  For him they are “hostile to civilization” and indeed “against intelligence itself.”  Suffering from “a pathetic poverty of feeling” the hip writers are “the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul – young men who can’t think straight and thus hate everyone who can.”  Though Podhoretz’ is one of the most extreme attacks, it is typical of the reception of the Beats among a good many critics and doubtless characterizes their image in the public as a whole.  

     Familiarity with hip artists became all but unavoidable for as the principal American periodicals Time and Life featured that curiosity, the beatnik (a derisive term first seen in print in Herb Caen’s newspaper column [10]).  In September of 1959 Life magazine printed a photo essay comparing the lifestyle of West Coast artists with that of small-town Kansas residents, giving every American a glimpse of an alternative.  Yet, apart from the misrepresentations of popular culture [11] the question of hip identity, was far from settled among the artists, most of whom were not critics, let alone theoreticians.

     The idea of disaffection, of “dropping out,” is widely shared, but the disaffection of the hip is neither random nor utterly nihilistic.  The positive values of the hip aesthetic are nearly all descended from those of the Romantics.  The most convenient demonstration of this lineage is perhaps Norman Mailer’s list of things which are hip and contrasting things which are square which he calls “a primitive foray into the more formal aspects of Hip” before noting “to my knowledge, no one yet has attempted this terrain.” [12].  In the simplest terms he labels spontaneous as hip, while orderly is square; wild is hip and practical square; instinct is hip and logic square; midnight hip, noon square (des Esseintes would have agreed).  In a social context Negro is hip, white is square; crooks are hip, while cops, naturally, are square.  Catholic is hip, presumably because of the ritual and magic, while Protestantism  is square (though perhaps Mailer would have made an exception for Black Pentecostals).  All this would have made a good deal of sense to Lord Byron.

     Some of Mailer’s opposed pairs are more imaginative, and take the reader a moment to understand.  Schrödinger’s model of the atom is hip, and Bohr’s is square, because the former takes quantum uncertainty into account.  Perverse is hip, pious square.  Some might remain somewhat obscure: physiology is hip and anatomy square (because it does not analyze process?)  the T-formation is hip, the single wing square.  He finds Nixon hip compared to John Foster Dulles, presumably because Nixon was such a fabulating hustler.  Apart from  Mailer’s turns of wit, the general pattern is clear.  Mailer privileges the intuitive, the physical, the irrational.

     Several significant elements of the hip semantic field must be added.  Among the probably erroneous etymologies for hip is one that offers an explanation for the word in the posture of users in  opium dens, reclining on one hip, while a competing explanation would have it suggest the hip flask in which one might carry liquor.  While neither seems likely as a source for the word, both assume an association between hip and mind-altering substances.  The connection, not necessarily essential, arises from three circumstances: the advocacy of pleasure-seeking implied by hip values, the ostracism from  the broader society and inclusion in a subculture that accompanies the use of illegal drugs, and the potential some such substances hold for mystical insight.  Thus Howl speaks of “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” Kerouac begins a letter ““Dig this, PEOTL EATERS OF THE HIP GENERATION,” [13] and Tower of Power’s 1973 song “What is hip?” answers “smokin’ only the best weed.”  The historical partiality of white Bohemians as well as African-Americans in  general and musicians in  particular to the use of illegal drugs strengthens the association.

     Advocates of psychedelics will prefer to call such substances entheogenic (meaning “becoming god-filled”) and point to the world-wide use of psychoactive drugs in spiritual practice from the ancient Hindu soma to the contemporary vogue for ayahuasca [14].  This element in  the meaning of hip returns to the first: to be in the know, in this case enlightened.  This grand ambition is evident in Kerouac’s description of On the Road as “an imaginative survey of a new American generation known as the ‘Hip’ (The Knowing) . . .  This new generation has a conviction that it alone has known everything or been ‘hip’ in the history of the world” [15].  Mailer had sought his “ancient heavenly connection” in existentialism, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, and Whalen in Buddhism, Richard Alpert and the Beatles in varieties of Hinduism, William Everson and Dorothy Day in a radical Christianity, but all pursued paths to spiritual liberation.

     Ironically the idea of hip may diverge from kitsch and camp in that, for all its associations with being au courant with the latest trends, hip is in substantial ways profoundly traditional.  For the sake of divertissement both kitsch and camp defend the ugly and the overdone; whereas hip aims directly at the truth, psychological, social, and cosmic, just as art has always done.  At the same time, hip values the experiential: pleasure and the aesthetic, the irrational and the mysterious, the ambivalent and the self-contradictory, and in all these ways it is deeply human.  For the hip art is play as is all experience, though the drama takes place amid “the iron gates of life.”  For the hip there is always a certain élan, a delight in the game, a winking confidence in the face of mortality, a sense that we may still laugh even if the joke is on us.

 

 

1.  Most celebrated (and influential) is Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp,” which itself cited Isherwood’s explanation in The World in the Evening in which his character Charles defines the term: “You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it, you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love …”  For him Dostoyevsky, Mozart, and El Greco were camp, while Beethoven and Rembrandt were not.  Clement Greenberg in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and Thomas Kulka in Kitsch and Art provide more hostile views.  For a variety of critics, see the essays in Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture, edited by Justyna Stępień.

2.  See, for instance, my examination of Boccaccio’s views posted this month as “Boccaccio on Poetry.”

3.  Often attributed to Baudelaire though I have not located the line in his oeuvres.  The first use is also  attributed to Privat d'Anglemont (1820–59) in the form “Je les ai épatés, les bourgeois.”   Flaubert used “terrifie les bourgeois” in a letter and by 1879 the Goncourts use “épater le bourgeois.”

4.  The term hepicat is also Wolof, meaning “one with open eyes.”  Dalby’s idea seems to have first been published in, of all things, the London Times of July 19, 1969.  It was accepted by many subsequent writers, including J . L. Dillard’s Black English (1972), Clarence Major in his Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, (1994), Joseph Holloway and Winifred Vass in The African Heritage of American English (1997).  The derivation is prominently featured in John Leland’s Hip: the History (2001).  Dissenters include Jesse Sheidlower in Slate (December 8, 2004) who used the term “crying Wolof” to indicate false African origins for Black American usage.

5.  May 9, 1903.  The puzzling “next” is perhaps a way of saying “to what will happen next.”  Dorgan had referred to “Joe Hip” and “Old Man Hip.”  Hep is usually considered to have preceded hip.  In 1947 Harry the Hipster recorded “It Ain’t Hep,” declaring that hep had become passé, superseded by hip. 

6.  The Autobiography of Malcom X, 105.  I recall a similarly disparaging usage among my hip friends in  college who called slightly younger aspirants to the scene “hippie,” equivalent to teenybopper,  well before the term came into popular usage.  This use is verified by the glossary of the 1959 comedy album How to Speak Hip, according to which a hipster is defined as "a fully paid-up member of Hip society", whereas a hippy is "a junior member of Hip society, who may know the words, but hasn't fully assimilated the proper attitude."

7.  First published in New World Writing 11 (1957), reprinted in Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg’s The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men (1958).  Rexroth reinforces the characterization of the hip as “disaffiliated” by Lawrence Lipton, doyen of the Venice Beach counter-culture.

8.  First published in Dissent (1957) and later reprinted as a pamphlet by City Lights and included in The Beat Generation  and the Angry Young Men.

9.  Norman Podhoretz, “The Know-nothing Bohemians,” Partisan Review XXV (1958).  Podhoretz was at least consistent in his reactionary activism.  In 1963 he published in Commentary "My Negro Problem—And Ours" in which he complained about his own feeling oppressed by African-Americans during his childhood, saying that Blacks "were doing the only persecuting I knew about - and doing it, moreover, to me," resulting in "the hatred I still feel for Negroes."  He later worked for the USIA, the Hudson Institute, and Rudy Giuliani. 

10.  See his column for April 2, 1958 in the San Francisco Chronicle.  Caen is also responsible for the equally annoying term hippie.  The September 21, 1959 issue of Life included a contrast of the lifestyles of West Coast hip artists with the people of small-town Hutchinson, Kansas.

11.  Maynard Krebs on the Dobie Gillis Show is one of the best-known, but even his image was subject to further devolution in the cartoon character of Shaggy Rogers on Scooby-Doo.

12. Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, p. 423.  The list, Mailer says, was originally notes for his “The White Negro” and the essay and list, he says, are “the intellectual core” of a proposed book.

13.  Letter to John Clellon Holmes, June 5, 1952 from Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940-1956, edited by Ann Charters, p 368.

14.  See my essay “Drugs and Religion” on this site at https://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2016/06/drugs-and-religion.html.

15.  Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940-1956, edited by Ann Charters, p. n224.

Boccaccio on Poetry

 

 References to Boccaccio in parentheses specify the book and section of the Genealogia deorum gentilium.  I used the edition translated, introduced, and edited by Charles Osgood which contains only the poetic theory contained in the XIV and XV books under the title Boccaccio on Poetry.  Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.

 

     Most medieval literary theory is couched in the language of rhetoric, inherited from ancient authorities like Cicero,  Quintilian, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum.  Works by Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland focused on figures of speech, thought, and sound, a tradition continued in the Renaissance by scholars like Puttenham and Peacham.  Many moderns are unsympathetic to such an approach as it eschews the emphases on originality, individuality, and inspiration we have inherited from the Romantics.  Yet ancients and moderns alike assert poetry’s special capacity to embody the truth.  Whereas rhetoric is linked with sophism and often suspected of subverting piety and moral order (by Plato and others), poetry has since archaic times been thought in some sense divine and the source of knowledge, spirituality, and moral behavior.  Many ancient authors accepted the Horatian formula that poetry must delight and instruct [1], and, indeed, some modern critics [2] maintain the idea that reading literature makes people better, not merely wiser, but more moral. 

     The concern with theme, what the writer implies about lived experience, and the idea that poetry can uplift readers spiritually, morally, and intellectually is central to Boccaccio’s defense of poetry against critics to whom all non-Christian art is frivolous and probably sinful.  To him even the pagan poets are sources of religious knowledge, albeit with vision limited by not knowing Christ (XIV, 8).  “Poetry devotes herself to something greater [than pursuit of money]; for while she dwells in heaven, and mingles with the divine counsels, she moves the minds of a few men from on high to a yearning for the eternal, lifting them by her loveliness to high reverie” (XIV, 4).  While they lack the inspiration the Holy Ghost lent sacred writers, they are similarly elevated by “mere energy of mind,” for which reason they are called “seers” (XIV, 8).  To him all literature is “a form of discourse which, under guise of invention, illustrates or proves an idea” (XIV, 9).  Poets are then “stimulators of virtue” (XIV, 15) and their works are “maidservants of Philosophy” (XIV, 18).  They may be at time obscure (XIV, 12), and their words may bear multiple meanings [3] (XIV, 12), but these difficulties serve the representation of complex truths.  For him the “sap of Philosophy” runs throughout imaginative literature (XIV, 10).  In his grand (if irritable) polemical style, those who cannot see the real meaning in poetry are denounced as “fools,” “madmen,” “blind,” idiots,” and the like.

     The basis for his analysis is the claim that myths, like poetry, are always allegorical, in the broadest sense of saying something other than the literal content.  This is the nature of rhetorical figures as a whole, and for Boccaccio myth always signifies something other than the apparent meaning. Fiction is for him “far from superficial”; it possesses always a “hidden truth” (XIV, 9).  For him the primary exception to literature’s noble role is certain comic writers whom he repeatedly dismisses as altogether pernicious, really sub-literary.

     Boccaccio’s defense of poetry occurs in the prefaces to the fourteenth and fifteenth books of his magnum opus, the Genealogia deorum gentilium (On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles) a massive attempt to set forth systematically the entire body of Classical mythology.  Boccaccio clearly regarded this as his magnum opus.  He expanded and revised the book over a period of fifteen years until his death, and it proved popular then for several hundred years.  The text was copied as a whole in forty-seven manuscripts and in part in many more.  The printed editio princeps appeared in 1472, followed by at least seven other editions in Latin before 1532 as well as translations into modern European languages.  Neglected now, it was long his best-known work. 

     Boccaccio’s ambition for this fifteen-volume work of scholarship goes well beyond providing information in a convenient form.  The understanding of Classical mythology for him was far more than a source of ornamentation for poets; it was a route to truth.  Whereas Thomas Bulfinch and Edith Hamilton primarily wished to make allusions explicable to modern readers, Boccaccio saw in myth something truer than true, something sublime and transcendent.  Mythic systems are all encyclopedic; they aim to account for all phenomena.  This is true of Babylonian, Egyptian, Germanic, Yoruba, and Hindu myths as well as those of ancient Greece and Rome.  Though their truths are always symbolic and poetic, they are nonetheless accurate.  Thus to master a mythological system is, in theory, to understand the world.  This all-inclusive hunger for vision explains why the book is so long and complex.  Long before the nineteenth century higher criticism distinguished between the J, E, and P versions of the Hebrew god, Boccaccio had differentiated three different Joves. 

     Mythology is one part of a program of Liberal Arts education, a term that yet survives though in practice such general training has been largely displaced in higher education by vocational courses.  For Boccaccio a Liberal Arts curriculum is required to develop “a wonderful keenness of mind” that leads to “the very inner mysteries of sacred philosophy” (XIV, 9).  Victorians justified the study of Classical languages as a sort of calisthenics for the brain, a preparation for the sort of problem-solving one encounters in everyday life, but for Boccaccio familiarity with Greek and Latin literature provided enlightenment directly.  In today’s decay of general culture and wide-open dispute about values, with the crassest material index, money, by far the most generally accepted, one might do worse than to immerse oneself in Homer and Vergil.

     Boccaccio was simply following the taste of his day in seeking to salvage the beauties of ancient poetry by claiming a moral purpose in the fanciful and sometimes racy stories of the gods.  In his own fourteenth century the L’Ovide Moralisé appeared provided thematic readings consistent with Christianity for the old stories of transformation.  Other examples of this pervasive approach to Classical mythology fill John Gower’s Confessio Amantis.  Gower concludes his treatment of the story of Actaeon (admittedly one of the stories more most amenable to a Christianized interpretation) with this cautionary warming.

 

Lo now, my Sone, what it is

A man to cast his yhe amis,

which Acteon hath dere aboght

Be war forthi and do it noght.

                                        (I, 379-382)

 

Many of the readings found there are similar to Boccaccio’s commentaries.  Both for instance, see the story of Apollo and Daphne as a cautionary tale warning against sexual indulgence and praising chastity and restraint. 

     The most common strategies Boccaccio adopts are euhemerism and moralizing.  For instance, he first glosses the story of Antaeus whom Hercules defeated by holding him in the air, out of contact with the earth, as an account of a historical king who founded the city of Tinge (Tangiers) who was so skilled at wrestling that he might be seen to draw strength from standing on the earth.  He then provides the ethical reading, saying that the earth here signifies such “lower” impulses as lust which can be defeated with discipline (I, 13).

     Some of his notions are more fanciful than others.  Venus’ attendant nymph Peristera may reasonably be considered to have been inspired by a “famous Corinthian prostitute,” yet the association of her nymphs with “the perpetual moisture in which the moon abounds” is pure whimsy, and no scholar would accept the derivation of the goddess’ name from “venam rem,” “an empty thing” (V, 2).  Yet even the more extravagant interpretations are significant, of Boccaccio’s vision if not of the ancients’.  The reader might regard his wilder speculations as the effervescence of intellectual ferment, not so different from some inventive post-structuralist readings.

     Moderns may lack the moral certainty that allows Boccaccio to distinguish “good muses,” “worthy of praise and reverence,” from “bad” ones, “obscene and detestable” (XIV, 20) [4], but many cling to the notion that literature improves the individual.  As this defense of art has been asserted since ancient times and Boccaccio adds little to the claim, the primary interest of moderns in his analysis in the Genealogia is instead his argument on behalf of the study of myth, believing, in a medieval anticipation of commentators like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, that such apparently fanciful and factually erroneous stories may encode profound wisdom and his broader belief that the study of the Liberal Arts exercises the mind in such a way as to elevate students’ behavior as well as their cognitive skills.  To him the sublime, a moral as well as an aesthetic category, is accessible through the language of mythology and the stories of the ancients provide the most complete, beautiful, and true symbolic representation of reality.

  

1.  Though present in earlier writers including Aristotle, this dictum is traditionally ascribed to Horace whose Epistle ad Pisonem states the concept several times.  “The poet strives to delight and help, at the same time to be pleasant and serviceable”  ("Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae."), “the useful and the sweet mixed” ("miscuit utile dulci"),  and "giving pleasure and admonitions" ("delectando pariterque monendo").  Sir Philip Sidney makes the same claim central in his “Defense of Poesy” as do many writers such as Matthew Arnold since.

 2.  Such views are today marginal.  See, for example, my brother James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: The Humanistic Alternative or psychologist Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angles of Our Nature.

 3.  Boccaccio several times delineates these varieties of interpretation, relying (though not absolutely) on the four-fold system of Biblical hermeneutics derived from Jewish practices, elaborated in Origen’s Quadriga, and refined by Augustine.  See XIV, 13.

4.  It is more revelatory about the Catholic Church and European culture than about poetry in general that the main moral deficiencies Boccaccio notes seem to be sexual misdeeds.