On Alexander Pope’s “Art of Sinking”

 with reflections on the abundance of bathos in our own time

 

 

I.

     Alexander Pope’s “Peri Bathous or the Art of Sinking in Poetry” [1] satirizes contemporary poets, in particular for what Pope (in a new application of the word) terms bathos, a mingling of the commonplace and the sublime that violates decorum.  While Pope’s title plays on the treatise On the Sublime attributed to Longinus, the piece is targeted at his poetic rivals, Ambrose Philips and a long list of others identified only by initials.  Pope was an active controversialist on the side of neo-Classicism and Tory rule, though personal rather than ideological motives seem at the base of many of his polemics.  In “Peri Bathous,” for instance, he is less concerned with setting forth literary principles than he is with criticizing others’ poor taste.  While the essay might disappoint the theorist, it is filled with Pope’s incisive wit, and accurately predicts a trajectory of modern poetry which, for better or for worse, has continued to pursue the “Art of Sinking.”

         In what might be called a comic apocalyptic reflex, Pope’s essay calls for an inversion of conventional values of literary judgement.  The fact is that there is little to differentiate the satirist from the objects of his ridicule in theory.  They all participate in the assumptions of neo-Classicism, yet in Pope’s view, his rivals are utterly incompetent.  Apart from ridiculing the absurdity of the “sinking” poetry they produce, Pope attacks hacks who write to order for pay in spite of the fact that he himself actively and successfully pursued a career as a professional writer.  

     Pope and the targets of his satire share their age’s stress on the value of models and in ornamentation through a generous use of rhetorical figures.   Thus, he declares, with the essay’s pervasive irony, that it is a “grievous errour” that “the rules of the ancients were equally necessary to the moderns” (I)  The tropes and figures he examines in some technical detail (X-XI) had been received ideas as the basis for the construction of aesthetic texts from the Rhetorica ad Herennium through Puttenham and into Pope’s day.

     The expressions Pope ridicules are not in form wrong; their absurdity arises through loss of decorum.   Pope’s central model of bathos is a figure in which one element is discordant with the next, the sort of ill-fitting parts that Horace figures at the outset of the “Art of Poetry” as monstrous chimerical creatures, for instance, part horse and part man, or woman and fish.  His rivals, he suggests, are unable to exercise taste enough to make the elements of their images match.  They work the same vein as he, but cannot perform up to his standard. 

     The poor taste of the poets Pope ridicules has, he believes, a material base: they write for money and thus will shape their efforts toward the most widespread popularity rather than the greatest beauty.  Rather than speaking of inspiration or genius, he focuses on the business of poetry, speaking of the “trade” and “manufacture” of literature.  (XIII)  Using the “Golden Rule of Transformation,” one may generate absurdities freely and reduce any object to the ridiculous by the simple technique of examining it through “the wrong end of a Perspective Glass, by which all the Objects of Nature are lessen’d.” (V)  This is in fact only an example of the departure from common sense and the acceptance of truth in nature which Pope decries.  In a way not wholly unlike the “commodity fetishization” Marx and his followers regarded as obscuring economic relations, this false view blocks the creation and appreciation of the sublime for Pope. [2] 

     Britain was moving already toward industrial capitalism during Pope’s time from the feudal agriculture-based economy, so the arbiter of aesthetic decision was becoming ever less the nobility and their toadies and becoming the literate bourgeoisie.  With even greater plausibility than those in the eighteenth century who doubted the judgement of the public in making political decisions, Pope’s persona neatly finesses his replacement of the Horatian formula by arguing that “if the intent of all poetry be to divert and instruct, certainly that kind, which diverts and instructs the greatest number, is to be preferred.”  The effect is to abandon any attempt to impress the cultivated, “men of a nice and foppish gusto, whom after all it is almost impossible to please,” or “to write for posterity of whose taste we cannot make any judgment,” and to make “gain the principal end of our art.” (II)  Though ironically expressed, these views echo Boileau who insists that the poet must write with “immortal Fame” in mind, that abject dedication to  patrons leads to work unbecomingly “fill'd with fulsome flatteries.”  The author must never choose “Gold for the object of a gen'erous Muse,” yet with “the Stars propitious Influence” a poet may yet hope “a sharp-sighted Prince, by early Grants/ Rewards your Merits, and prevents your Wants.” [3] 

     Therefore, one need have no particular training, background, or apprenticeship to be poetic; it is rather within reach of everyman.  In fact, Pope playfully suggests that certain low persons might prove especially gifted.  Since “nothing is more evident than that divers persons, no other way remarkable, have each a strong disposition to the formation of some particular trope or figure,” the production of poetry could be done collectively by these specialists. (XIII)  Thus fishmongers might compose epithets, since “epithets may be found in great plenty at Billingsgate,” anadiplosis may be trusted to “common criers and hawkers, who by redoubling the same words persuade people to buy their oysters, green hastings, or new ballads,” and “the ellipsis, or speech by half-words” entrusted to “ministers and politicians.”

     In what now seems a striking anticipation of both assembly line production and the capitalist creation of imaginative works by committee in film and television designed to appeal to the largest demographics.  In the early days of the Industrial Revolution Pope had in this essay invented the English use of the term bathos as though it were necessary to define a new phenomenon, but, in the centuries since, bathos has flourished to such an extent and readers have, during the last century, proven so fond on “low” imagery that the bathetic has proven dominant.

     In his own view, Pope was nothing but normative.  It is he who imitates nature and they who are “anti-natural.” (V)  To him he is the reasonable man calling attention to the failings of the unreasonable.  He considers himself a member not so much of a partisan group as of the party of the correct.  In terms of his condemnation of writing for money, his own practice had been mixed and transitional like his age.  While constantly seeking highly placed supporters, Pope had no illusions about patronage and in the Dunciad satirizes those who value the most extravagant praise from their poets over the most competent verse.  “He wins this Patron who can tickle best” (II 198)  Pope’s own competence, allowing him to build his villa in Twickenham, was made by the sales of his translations of Homer and then his edition of Shakespeare.  He also cultivated patrons such as Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and Allen Bathurst, Baron and later 1st Earl Bathurst.  Yet the transitional character of the age is clear in the fact the popularity and patronage were by no means mutually exclusive.  Pope and others published sometimes by subscription and one noble title on the list will attract others as well as those on lower rungs of the social ladder.

     The reader may look to Pope for superb craft and brilliant wit.  He excels at formulating “what oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,” but he does not strive after original ideas, nor is he really a man of ideas at all.  He is nonetheless an outstanding poet, and it is his poetic gift that illuminates “The Art of Sinking.”  In it the reader may see art questioning its own ability to survive the coming of the age of crass capitalist philistinism.  

 

 

II.

     Though the modern reader may suspect that Pope was not in the end arguing on behalf of anything more than his own superior practice, he was quite right about the shift in the business of literature.  With the hegemony of monopoly and finance capitalism in the centuries since has come likewise a further “sinking.”  The eighteenth century could scarcely have imagined the depths to which modern artists have sunk during an age in which popularity is virtually uncontested as an index of excellence, and even the educated discuss television shows and rock bands and know nothing further of the arts.  These commodified commercial forms, of course, for the most part assume the predominant values of their society just as all popular genres will tend to do. 

     The hierarchical structure which enables Pope’s complaint of mixing low and high is explicitly opposed by many modern poets.  The tendency is commonplace since Wordsworth was attacked for his

language “which is coarse, inelegant or infantine,” betraying “perverseness and bad taste.”  The influential Lord Jeffrey, with assumptions little changed from Pope’s found in Wordsworth the fault “of connecting his most lofty, tender, or impassioned conceptions, with objects and incidents, which the greater part of his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting.     All the world laughs at Elegiac stanzas to a sucking-pig — a Hymn on Washing-day — Sonnets to one's grandmother — or Pindarics on gooseberry-pye.” [4]

     Since that rear-guard assault by a traditionalist over two hundred years ago, the parameters of poetry have shifted dramatically and bathos has, proven if not a clear victor, the stronger contender.  Readers will require no evidence on this score as most of the innovative currents since the Romantics have justified the use of the banal, the vulgar, and the colloquial and have often intentionally linked low and high. [5]  A brief survey of such practices might include Whitmanic, Cubist, Imagist, Objectivist, and Socialist Realist poetry which each of which in its own way values the “low.”  Vorticism, Aleatory, and Language poetry privilege discontinuities. [6]  Surely Pope would have thought quite preposterous the ironic modes of aesthetic appreciation that have developed in the last hundred years: the kitsch, the camp, the hip all intentionally appreciate what a traditionalist would find ugly.  Great work has been done even by the extreme practitioners in this mode; one need think only of Gertrude Stein and Francis Ponge, but their achievements would have only bewildered a critic of Pope’s sensibilities. 

     The causes of this evolution may be various, but the most significant is surely that named by Pope – the substitution of an undiscriminating public for a smaller but more cultivated audience.  The analysis of audience is turned upon Pope himself by Christopher Caudwell, in his classic of ‘thirties vulgar Marxist literary history.  With the pose of certainty associated with “scientific” socialism, Caudwell asserts that Alexander Pope “perfectly expresses the ideals of the bourgeois class in alliance with a bourgeoisified aristocracy in the epoch of manufacture.”  [7]  Dependent on patrons, poets of his day were obliged “to To him “Pope’s poetry and his ‘reason’” are “a reflection of that stage of the bourgeois illusion where freedom for the bourgeoisie can only be ‘limited.’”  Introducing a surprisingly affective term Caudwell says that in the eighteenth century “the imposition of outward forms on the heart is necessary and accepted.”

    While true, these statements are not far from being simple truisms and thus of little probative value.  Every poet, even the avant-garde and the counter-cultural, must “speak the language of his paymasters.”  And surely freedom is always limited, the living heart cannot be entirely liberated.  Out of tension and contradiction arise history, consciousness, and poetry, charged always with unsatisfied desire.  Perfect satisfaction, total enlightenment is silent. Absence of form is chaos.  Human ideas are defined by the specific forms thought assumes under multiple determinants. 

     A siren in the form of the mirage of a coherent chain of being sang to Pope.  He saw his place beneath a proper king atop a structure that included enlightened patrons.  Aristocrats might demonstrate their nobility by refined taste in this scheme while less sensitive readers gulp down bad verse.  The more common modern illusion collapses the old value distinctions and eliminates the standard of decorum.  Yet the modern idea of the poet justifies itself by a kind of democracy of things, a notion developing from Donne through Wordsworth and Whitman, in which a bedbug may be as grand as a mountain and form is infinitely variable.  We look back on Pope, then, with nostalgia, as one who lived during those when one could imagine a bedrock of established truth beneath his feet.      

 

 

1.  the essay was published under the name Martinus Scriblerus in “The Last Volume” of Motte’s Miscellanies in  Prose and Verse March 8, 1727/8   The authorship is still contested by some scholars, with Arbuthnot and Swift the other candidates, but contemporary opinion favors Pope.  For a discussion of the issue in a complete critical edition see Edna Leake Steeves’ The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1952).

2.  Cf. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935).

3.  Art of Poetry, translated by William Soames and revised by John Dryden, Canto IV, lines 100, 138, 143, and 155-159.

4.  Francis Jeffrey, Review of Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes; Edinburgh Review 11 (October 1807) 214-31.

5.  Even trends like the Symbolists and later prophetic and “deep image” practitioners which aspire to sublimity do so often through unassuming or unlikely imagery. 

6.  Charles Bernstein says in “Semblance”: “Textures, vocabularies, discourses, constructivist modes of radically different character are not integrated into a field as part of a predetermined planar architecture; the gaps and jumps compose a space with shifting parameters, types and styles of discourse constantly crisscrossing, interacting, creating new gels."

7.  Illusion and Reality, 86.

Notes on Recent Reading 22 [Waugh, Belloc, Okakura]

When the Going Was Good [Waugh]

     I am generally intolerant of abridgments, but I can recommend this volume, made of five long continuous excerpts from the four travel books Waugh wrote between 1929 and 1935. Waugh, whose portrait by Henry Lamb elegantly if casually dressed with a pipe and a drink, insouciantly held, manages in these works of his youth to alternate comedic and satiric episodes reminiscent of Mark Twain with anecdotes detailing the sort of weird disoriented experience the traveler often encounters. He is, in these latter moments, kin to Robert Byron and Bruce Chatwin and, I would venture, a late and dry descendent of Smollett’s “sentimental” traveler.
     He’s just fine on Istanbul and Cairo, but the book excels in the tropical boondocks. Describing his visits to British Guiana and in “Abyssinia,” where Waugh attended first for Haile Selassie’s coronation and later reported on the Italian invasion, he provides an excellent report of both the discomforts he underwent from climate and insects and the total dysfunction of government and, indeed, most aspects of life. He relays accurately the sensations of the outsider passing through, but, at the same time, these stories plant a suspicion that one’s own world might be at bottom little different than these remote places.
     If Waugh’s own vision was tinged with shadow, this dark side was emphasized by the final piece reporting on the coming of Italian fascism to a hapless African state and the devastating world-wide war that followed. His calling these pre-war books When the Going Was Good reflects not just a nostalgia for his younger days, but also a sense that the wholesale destruction from years of war, accented by the unprecedented horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, had aged not just the author but the world as a whole which never could be the same again.


The Road to Rome (Belloc)

     Belloc’s account of his pilgrimage on foot from Lorraine to Rome is clever, imaginative, and provocative. The book is embellished with his landscape drawings (he says he cannot draw people and includes these sketches for “fun”). A spirited stylist and a wit, he is perfectly willing to sound as often uncharitable or even harsh as he is sympathetic and generous-spirited. Though the Latin tags and religious musing had their own appeal, I read the book as a road chronicle, thinking of Jack London and Jack Kerouac as Belloc describes his disreputable appearance from days of walking and sometimes sleeping rough. His contemptuous dismissal of socialist and anarchist ideas recalled to me his fondness for fascism (though he had a peculiar variant of his own in Distributism as Pound did in Social Credit)and his easy expression of the most commonplace and thoughtless anti-Semitism. These interfered with my own appreciation no more than his odd and absolute notions of Catholicism, to him definitive of European culture. He runs the risk of all more or less accurate travel journal of dry patches (that need not correspond at all to what seemed tiresome in lived experience). Indeed he comments on the problem more than once in amusing dialogues between auctor and lector.


The Ideals of the East (Okakura)

     Kakuzo Okakura played a critical role in mediated cultural relations between the Far East and the West a hundred years ago. His Book of Tea popularized Buddhist and Taoist thought in the U.S. and Europe. This exponent of Asian art was himself profoundly bicultural. After attending mission schools, he was trained by Ernest Fenellosa (who meant so much to Pound) at Tokyo Imperial University. He wrote his most significant work in in English and, after founding the Japan Art Institute, headed the Asian arts division of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Associated with Heidegger, Tagore, Vivekenanda and other non-Japanese, he sought to define Asian art in broadest and most ambitious view.
     Though we are all familiar with the traditional presentation of European art that traces concepts and practices from origins in Greece and Rome through to the present, I think I have never before read a book that sought to present Asian culture as a whole from India to Japan. While Okakura’s book may be seen as an early attempt to explain Asia to the Occident, it is also an assertive statement of national pride. Okakura subtitles his work “with Special Reference to the Art of Japan,” and his nationalism along with his bias toward ethnic explanations seem to arise from the recent successes of the Japanese military against the Russians and to point ominously forward to the militarists who were to invade China and bomb Pearl Harbor a few decades after this 1904 work. This tendency is heightened in his The Awakening of Japan a few years later. It is also possible read these ideas backward to the influence of Hippolyte Taine and his “race, milieu, moment.”

Notes on Recent Reading 21 [Fussell, Mahfouz, Watts]

The Norton Book of Travel [edited by Paul Fussell]

     Unfortunately Mr. Fussell has mistaken descriptive literary passages for travel writing. Little harm is done by including odd verses such as Blake’s “Ah, Sunflower,” Hardy’s “Midnight on the Great Western,” or Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” but passages from Dodsworth or Farewell to Arms do not belong in this anthology. Travel writing is a genre itself; fiction and lyric are likely to privilege other priorities.
     His claim that travel in the modern sense is a very recent amusement is of a piece with his citation of Freud “A great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfillment of . . . early wishes to escape the father and especially the family.” Psychologists may now see how many of Freud’s insights, while profound, are bound by time and culture. Still, one is glad for his discussing the theory of travel at all and for ferreting out the quotation (and the next, from Levi-Strauss, and Aristotle and then Flaubert a few lines later). In the middle of this pleasant miscellany of opinion, one does encounter a few sound truisms, such as travel being broadening and sharpening the senses, and he concludes with a sound observation on the double narrative (observer and observed) implied by every travel story.
     In the end the variety of ideas set forth resembles the variety of texts. There is plenty to enjoy. He does include the marvelous Robert Byron, and I did encounter the Romantic German vagabond in England Karl Philip Moritz here for the first time.

 

The Thief and the Dogs [Mahfouz] 

     Naguib Mahfouz’ novel would make an excellent film noir screenplay. The main character’s consciousness is consistently desperate and anxious; the reader sympathizes with antihero Said, a petty thief driven by his sense of honor to violence. The action is swift and unrelenting as he drives toward his own wretched fate. He is stoic, only rarely allowing a glimmer of hope to intrude on his self-righteous victimhood. Though a criminal, he has the sense of the long-exploited that he is merely setting things straight in a small way when he takes the belongings of the rich. His affection for his daughter is real, but he was not cut out to be a father. His relations with women are defined by his wounded pride at Nabawiyya and the favors he accepts from Nur. The violence that results seems to arise more from profound anguish than from the political context – the collapse of the hope of intellectuals in Nasser-style socialism -- that is regarded by many as a significant theme. The Sufi Sheikh Ali al-Junaydi provides mystical commentary for those who prefer Sufism to Existentialism.


Myth and Ritual in Christianity [Watts]

     From adolescence I have been fascinated with mysticism. I devoured Evelyn Underhill’s books, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, and (pseudo-)Dionysius the Areopagite and tried to imagine myself in ineffable transport. I proved to be the worst of meditators in spite of the fact that in those days I could pull myself into a full lotus. My contemplative peak was the ability to undergo Friends meeting for worship with satisfaction if not divine “openings.” One impediment I experienced was difficulty in interpreting the mythic system with which I was most familiar, that of Christianity. Even when I went through confirmation as a Protestant, I had lost whatever faith I had had as a young child. Even after years in the realms of Daoist, Buddhist, and Hindu thought, I never felt I had a sympathetic grasp Christ’s story or of the Christian reading of the Hebrew scriptures until I read this book.
     Now, I am well aware that Watts had a good bit of the charlatan about him (as do many native shamans). He had undertaken Zen training before becoming a priest and then a media figure (though at first only on KPFA, the Pacifica station in Berkeley). He gained a considerable reputation as a bon vivant with an eye for the women and a relish for alcohol and other drugs. Christians will recoil from his heterodoxy just as his Buddhism was criticized by D. T. Suzuki himself. Still, he taught me important things that have opened up to me way of understanding a great many Christian texts. After fifty years I reread this book without disappointment.

Another Look at The Seven Lively Arts

     Gilbert Seldes’ The Seven Lively Arts (1924) was ground-breaking in its application of serious critical judgment to phenomena of popular culture. Seldes’ most striking observations have stood up well. Many today would enthusiastically agree with his arguments for the excellence of jazz, Charlie Chaplin, and Krazy Kat (though he is far from the only cultivated appreciator of these particular works). His position was moderate indeed; he claimed only that critical acumen might be fruitfully applied to works regarded as mere entertainment and that the best of popular art was superior to a good deal of high art. He did not argue that the popular is better or even equal to more ambitious works. Indeed, Seldes takes care to conclude the book with an encounter with a new work by Picasso – a favorite target of the day’s philistines -- which he instantly recognizes as one of “the world’s greatest works of art.” [291] Few today would quarrel with his claim that either elite or popular art succeeds if well-done and fails if, in his word, “bogus.” He correctly locates the constitution of art in the consumption: “no one imagines that a pedant or a half-wit, enjoying a classic or a piece of ragtime, is actually getting all that the subject affords.” [293]
     Seldes made his contribution as a journalistic critic rather than a literary theorist. His comments are informal, often impressionistic, but he does make sometimes make general assertions that I cannot accept. Part of his motive in claiming worth for the “lively arts” is a sort of patriotic American exceptionalism in which the excellence of popular forms arises from a democratic political system. Of course, had he lived elsewhere, he might have been celebrating Grock the clown (who he says flopped in America), the early Tintin or the bal musette. At any rate, his enthusiasm led him to greet broadcasting – competing stations, free to the consumer – as an essentially American form of art. He joined CBS as director of television programs in 1937 at which point what had been an outlier position among the Dial intellectuals earned him a lucrative salary and broad influence in shaping popular art. Seldes remained enough of a high-brow to express mild doubts late in his career about Elvis and even his own field of network television.
     To him truly great art has a “high seriousness’ [293] whereas the “minor arts” have a corresponding “high levity.” [294] Socrates, who told us that the genius of comedy was identical to that of tragedy, might have demurred. Could levity mount higher than in Aristophanes, Rabelais or Henry IV, Part 1? Perhaps because of this categorical distinction and the value judgment associated with it, Seldes considers the first rank of artistic excellence unattainable by popular works. But why? If we can understand the artfulness of Homer and recognize a long series of works at once wholly popular and aesthetically satisfying from Euripedes through Beowulf and Shakespeare and Dickens, what limits modern popular forms to a lesser achievement?
     One reasonable response is to ask what work a tasteful person might nominate. The issue is clouded by the fact that, due to their highly repetitive and conventionalized nature, popular works are often praised as a whole without further more specific reference. Thus many television viewers love a particular series yet have less ready enthusiasm for individual episodes; readers of the comics like the strip itself, not certain days alone. In films a distinction exists between “stars” who repeatedly play a particular sort of character, often supposed close to the performer’s own nature and actors who can play any of a wide variety of roles. John Wayne and Peter Lorre are examples of the first; Bette Davis and Dustin Hoffman of the second. Within Chaplin’s oeuvre there is a considerable development from the early two-reelers which were largely improvisatory and episodic (somewhat like commedia dell’arte) with each gag succeeding the last to such architecturally planned finished works as The Gold Rush or Modern Times.
     Today, of course, some post-structuralist critics would deny value judgments altogether, but Seldes’ whole well-worked-out point is an extension of the task of the journalistic reviewer which is specifically to make such judgments. I once knew a film critic who considered Night of the Living Dead the greatest monument of recent American art and I consider Pogo an important work at least, so I don’t doubt that nominees could be offered, but could any consensus, any canonization, ever emerge? Seldes cites the Yankee crowd’s acclaim of a Babe Ruth home run as “a beauty” as evidence for the common people’s aesthetic discernment [297], but surely what they enjoyed was something quite different from a work of art, even a dance performance.
     That very daring, though, endears Seldes. One can imagine him thinking of ever less likely topics for aesthetic evaluation: the revue, the newspaper columnist . . . one reads his ranking of clowns without being concerned that one has never seen them perform. His observations are valuable because of his absorption in the actual quality of lived experience rather than some abstract standard. Whatever one makes of Seldes’ conclusions, he raised points of such importance that they altered the thinking of later critics and underlay later academic upheavals such as the development of “cultural studies.” His book remains a fascinating and adventurous excursion into the popular art of the twenties.


Page references are to the 1957 edition to which Seldes added new comments, occasionally reflecting on the progress of commodified mass art.

Thoughts on Mythology

These are notes from my recent talk on mythology at the Seligmann Center. I pass on my ideas in this raw form, without any attempt to work up an essay, in the belief that some of the ideas may be useful.


1
     The Greek word muthos in Homer has a broad meaning, fundamentally, anything delivered by word of mouth. The term came later to indicate conversation, counsel, the subject of speech, the matter, a purpose, a saying, a rumor; then a fiction or legend.

2
     In contemporary literary use, it is a story not tied to an individual text. Mythology arises as a sort of collective narrative: a body of linked and particularly significant stories that express in symbolic order the world-view of a community. Myth is deeply involved not only with the earliest poetry, but also science, philosophy, religion, and history, in fact all the intellectual disciplines. The definitive authority myths claim is evident in the fact that they often concern the gods or other spiritual beings. Myths are often taken as literal history, though they are also used by writers in self-consciously symbolic ways. Myth fades into legend and other cultural material.

3
     Not every collective narrative is mythic. Historical events are shared by large numbers of people. They may resonate in mythic ways, but the presumptive loyalty is to real events. Jokes lack the vast implications of myths.

4
     I continue to find Northrup Frye’s classification useful.

1) superior in kind to people and to their environment: mythic
2) superior in degree to people and environment: romance
3) superior in degree to people but not to environment: high mimetic (a hero of epic or tragedy, Aristotle’s hero)
4) inferior to the reader or equal: low-mimetic, ironic (realism, comedy)

     Frye notes, “Looking over this table, we see that European fiction, over the last fifteen centuries has moved steadily down this list . . . Something of the same progression can be traced in Classical literature, too.”

5
     In The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art David Lewis-Williams analyzes cave paintings and posits a simultaneous birth of language, art, and religion. With the birth of signs came the ability to lie.

6
      Mythic references may be traditional (Homeric hymns, Elder Edda, anthropological texts), literary (Ovid, Shakespeare, Rothenburg), modern (Superman, cowboy hero, Jewish blood guilt, Lincoln), or idiosyncratic (Blake, Yeats, outsider art).

7
     In poetry mythological references may serve to universalize or create group identity (as in the many medieval romances which wither begin or end by invoking the blessing of Christ), to compress (as in Raleigh’s reference to Philomel implying a world of violence in a word), to ironize, (as in Joyce’s Ulysses or the Coens’ O Brother Where Art Thou), or to decorate (as in Herrick’s “Parcae” where Atropos charms rather than frightens).

8
     Approaches to the understanding of myth include:

1) Euhemerism regards myths as distorted accounts of real historical events. Herodotus in his reasonable way, has recourse to this explanation. (On the other hand some ritual theorists would agree with Frye (above), and hold the opposite view: that gods degenerate over the years into myth, then legend (with supernatural apparatus), appearing next as history and finally as comedy.

2) Mythology has often been viewed as a sort of allegory with the gods representing either natural phenomena or concepts. The 19th century Sanskritist Max Müller supported an allegorical theory of myth. Modern variations of this theme include Freudian, Jungian, or other psychological theories.

3) Myths have been viewed as solely functional, often a form of social control. A simple form of this approach would be the vulgar Marxist analyst to whom every myth comments on class relations, but Malinowski took much the same approach.

4) The structural theory states that myths are patterned after the human mind as well as human nature. Claude Levi-Strauss, makes the claim that “myth is language,” and stresses formal play with meaning arising only from contrasts within a pattern, not from individual elements.

5) According to the myth-ritual theory, the existence of myth is tied to ritual. In its most extreme form, this theory claims that myths arose to explain rituals. I am myself fond on the work of James Frazer and the Cambridge School.

6) Myth has been considered the human language for investigating the metaphysical. In this sense myth is much like religion, providing human’s most profound analysis of the cosmos.

7) Myth is a symbolic statement about reality. Each culture defines and defends its assumptions with myth. Myth tends toward the encyclopedic, offering seamless explanations and prescriptions for the significant passages of life.

9
     To test these ideas with texts, I followed with this brief anthology of poem’s mentioning Aphrodite.

from Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (my translation)

She went to Paphos -- Cyprus -- where her
aromatic altar and her temple stood,
and she went in and shut the shining doors. 60
The graces then anointed her with oil
such as blooms on bodies of the gods.
(The oil was sweet, ambrosial, smelled so fine!)
Then laughter-loving Aphrodite donned
fine clothes of golden fabric on her flesh. 65
She left sweet-smelling Cyprus then for Troy
(fast she flew and high, the clouds her road),
to spring-rich Ida, beast-land, came she then,
she went through hills right to his home and after her
came bright-eyed lions, fawning grey-furred wolves 70
and bears, fast leopards ravenous for deer,
and then her heart rejoiced at seeing them
and to their hearts she tossed hot lust; they paired
in twos and mated in the shade,


Thomas Wyatt (the first stanza of an untitled poem)

Though this port : and I thy servaunt true,
And thou thy self doist cast thy bemes from hye
From thy chieff howse, promising to renew
Both Joye and eke delite, behold yet how that I,
Bannisshed from my blisse, carefully do crye,
"Helpe now, Citherea, my lady dere,
"My ferefull trust," en vogant la galere.


from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

Over one arm the lusty courser's rein
Under her other was the tender boy, 32
Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain,
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy;
She red and hot as coals of glowing fire
He red for shame, but frosty in desire. 36

The studded bridle on a ragged bough
Nimbly she fastens;—O! how quick is love:—
The steed is stalled up, and even now
To tie the rider she begins to prove: 40
Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust,
And govern'd him in strength, though not in lust . . .

'Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: 232
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

'Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain, 236
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain:
Then be my deer, since I am such a park; 239
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.'


A Hymn to Venus and Cupid (Herrick)

SEA-BORN goddess, let me be
By thy son thus grac'd and thee;
That whene'er I woo, I find
Virgins coy but not unkind.
Let me when I kiss a maid
Taste her lips so overlaid
With love's syrup, that I may,
In your temple when I pray,
Kiss the altar and confess
There's in love no bitterness.

Final stanza from Un Voyage à Cythère (Baudelaire)
On your isle, O Venus! I found upright only
A symbolic gallows from which hung my image...
O! Lord! give me the strength and the courage
To contemplate my body and soul without loathing!
Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n'ai trouvé debout
Qu'un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image...
— Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!

Venus Anadyomène (Rimbaud)

As from a green zinc coffin, a woman’s
Head with brown hair heavily pomaded
Emerges slowly and stupidly from an old bathtub,
With bald patches rather badly hidden;

Then the fat gray neck, broad shoulder-blades
Sticking out; a short back which curves in and bulges;
Then the roundness of the buttocks seems to take off;
The fat under the skin appears in slabs:

The spine is a bit red; and the whole thing has a smell
Strangely horrible; you notice especially
Odd details you’d have to see with a magnifying glass…

The buttocks bear two engraved words: CLARA VENUS;
—And that whole body moves and extends its broad rump
Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.

Comme d’un cercueil vert en fer blanc, une tête
De femme à cheveux bruns fortement pommadés
D’une vieille baignoire émerge, lente et bête,
Avec des déficits assez mal ravaudés;

Puis le col gras et gris, les larges omoplates
Qui saillent; le dos court qui rentre et qui ressort;
Puis les rondeurs des reins semblent prendre l’essor;
La graisse sous la peau paraît en feuilles plates:

L’échine est un peu rouge, et le tout sent un goût
Horrible étrangement; on remarque surtout
Des singularités qu’il faut voir à la loupe…

Les reins portent deux mots gravés: CLARA VENUS;
—Et tout ce corps remue et tend sa large croupe
Belle hideusement d’un ulcère à l’anus.


An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji (Snyder)

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.


Birth of Eventually Venus (MacLeish)

Cast up by the sea
By the seventh wave
Beyond the sea reach
In the rubble of weed and
Wet twig
The not yet amphibious
Animalcula
Gasps and wiggles on the beach
Gathering her long gold hair about her
And gazing with pure eyes
Upon the unknown world.

Venus Over the Desert (Williams)

If I do not sin, she said, you shall not
walk in long gowns down stone corridors.
There is no reprieve where there is no fall-
ing off. I lie in your beds all night, from
me you wake and go about your tasks. My flesh
clings to your bones. What use is holiness
unless it affirms my perfections, my breasts,
my thighs which you part, shaking, and my lips
the door to my pleasures? Sin, you call it,
but there cannot be cold unless the heat
has bred it, how can you know otherwise? Love
comfort me in the face of my defeats! Poor
monks, you think you are gentle but I tell you
you kill as sure as shot kills a bird flying.

The Death of Venus (also titled the Birth of Venus) (Creeley)

I dreamt her sensual proportions
had suffered sea-change,

that she was a porpoise
a sea-beast rising lucid from the mist.

The sound of waves killed speech
But there were gestures –

of my own, it was to call her closer,
of hers, she snorted and filled her lungs with water,

then sank, to the bottom,
and, looking down, clear it was, like crystal,

there I saw her.

Apologia for a Fondness for Pound

     Since my middle school years, I have considered Ezra Pound the greatest poet of the first half of the twentieth century. (Who might be the best of the second half I cannot say, though I could name some good ones.) Whether I like it or not, this choice inevitably ensnares me in Pound’s politics, his peculiar brand of fascism and his more sinister anti-Semitism. Never wavering in my youthful judgment, I feel it remains necessary to make an apologia which, while it has nothing to do with art, is required on ethical grounds.
     Dramatic and disturbing as Pound’s history is, it has no place in the evaluation of his work. Though critics agree on little, I think there would be a consensus among all but a few non-literary hangers-on (perhaps a stray Catholic or two or a superannuated vulgar Marxist) that assessment of literary value has nothing whatever to do with the author’s ideas or even the text’s relation to a reader’s lived experience. While it is true that for millennia the poet was charged with a simple and direct teaching role, we moderns have learned to use art’s fictions more subtly to sniff our way toward a satisfactory vision. For both the old Aesthetes and the New Critics, and all the more for many post-structuralists, the poem must stand (or fall) alone, independent of any facts of the author’s biography. Most of us recognize the old trope of the poet as prophet as a rhetorical figure, useful to intensify certain sorts of statements. It would be an uphill battle indeed for anyone attempting to claim for the artist a privileged access to Truth.
     Still, fascism is so recent and pernicious a movement that it is difficult for some to accept the general rule. Our reading of Plato or Isaiah is not impeded by the fact that they saw nothing wrong in slavery; we can relish any of a host of European Roman Catholic artists who would not have dreamed of criticizing the Inquisition, even when the church was known to be torturing and killing its victims. Apart from such unquestioned fascists as Céline, D’Annunzio, and Marinetti, there were countless semi-fascists and casual anti-Semites in the first half of the twentieth century: Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. Even such an unlikely suspect as Gertrude Stein was a lifelong reactionary who thought Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize and adored Pétain, calling him the “George Washington of France” and translating his speeches, including the virulent anti-Semitic passages. Whatever she may have been thinking, has this anything at all to do with Tender Buttons?
     So Pound’s politics, whatever interest they may hold for historians, psychologists, economists, or ethicists, shouldn’t matter in reckoning his literary value. So far as I am concerned, this principle is not restricted to the arts. If I require the services of a heart surgeon, I will seek the best qualified and most experienced individual. Should he also be a Republican homophobe, my choice would not be affected. The same is true of all expertise.
     Indeed, though it does not exculpate the poet, his anti-Semitism seems largely a monstrously ill-considered pose. Pound’s economic and political views were primarily based in a revulsion against the acquisitive consumer society modern capitalism has produced. His Social Credit ideas were peculiar, and he consistently maintained Jewish friends. Even his feeble final volte-face, in which he called anti-Semitism a “stupid, suburban prejudice,” suggests the irresponsible flimsiness of his racism.
     Pound’s importance in literary and critical history is unquestionable, yet my fondness for him is, I fancy, wholly aesthetic. I echo Eliot’s celebrated dedicatory praise: just as Arnaut Daniel was for Dante, Pound is in fact il miglior fabbro. It is clear that, the analysis of literary value depends on an interaction between text and reader and, for this reason, cannot be “objective.” One reader finds a jewel in what to another might be tiresome and empty. Still, certain works have, over time, proven richer and more productive than others. It is clear that this judgment does not predictably rely on inherent qualities when some texts of little inherent interest, certain passages in the Bible, for instance, have gained depth and significance through many layers of careful interpretation.
     I can only lay out my case on Pound’s behalf. Perhaps his categories of melopoeia and phanopoeia (bracketing logopoeia for cause) can make my case. Can any modern composer of free verse match the music in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley?


These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case . .
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some "pro patria, non dulce non et decor". .

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy.


      As for images, one need not return to the early bits. Canto XVI, for instance, offers the following moments in a montage: “the road like a slow screw’s thread,” “[his eyes] whirling like flaming cart-wheels,” “flames patterned in lacquer,” “hell ticks, scales, fallen louse eggs,” “fish heaped in a bin,” and on it goes, an apparently inexhaustible fountain each term of which offers startling clarity.
     Such exhibits could be endlessly extended, but to little purpose. The bulkiest chrestomathy could go no further than to specify my own reactions, without necessarily inspiring the like in others. Still every sensitive reader of poetry must agree that first-rate poetry obliterates biography and history, if only for a moment. When they return, as they must to salvage humane values, art’s terms are no longer in play. When, by that reckoning the poet must be condemned, the verdict has nothing to do with his art. And yet the art remains. And some will return to it, regardless the artist’s life. For those to whom the posies of the beaux arts make life livable (and the anthropological evidence is that this embraces all homo sapiens), all else can be, for a time, ignored.

Notes on Recent Reading 8 [Bakhtin, Lewis, Brown]

Rabelais and his World [Bakhtin]

     Bakhtin’s book has made a significant contribution to the understanding of Rabelais (as well as explaining his centuries-long misinterpretation), but, even more importantly, it establishes a new category of humor that shapes the reader’s understanding of comedy itself. That the author did his important work under Stalin’s regime is the more remarkable
     Bakhtin’s revealing information on topics such as folk observances, vituperative speech, Cyprian’s Dinner, and the Easter laugh would alone make the book worth reading. The application of these data to Rabelais was ground-breaking; such analyses as the discussion of the wedding customs of the Bum-bailiffs in Book Four (to take an example almost at random) are persuasive, magnifying rather than diminishing the strength of the texts.
     But the greatest achievement of Bakhtin’s book is to define a unique form of comedy, one associated with the Carnival holiday, a universalizing humor embracing all of humankind, the wise and comely as well as the ridiculous, a sort of grand upwelling of spirit in which the dualities of pain and pleasure, life and death dissolve in laughter. Rabelais and his World is a rare book of criticism. A work of art in itself, it illuminates a text but teaches the reader as well about literature in general and even, perhaps, a bit about life.


It Can’t Happen Here [Lewis]

     I do recall the pleasure of a suburban sixth-grader looking for allies in his opposition to the “booboisie” (to use Mencken’s term). The satiric shots in Main Street may have had targets already a generation gone, but every one of them was pointed in the correct direction. I fancy, though, that even then I suspected Lewis of being a bit flat, his points repetitive, his analysis shallow and too easy.
     In fact It Can’t Happen Here is best read as a potboiler, a genre on which Lewis had cut his teeth. As a boy’s adventure story it is almost readable, while artistically and on the political thematic level, it is a labored exercise. The view from Sauk Centre made the small fish, the petty bourgeoisie, look like the ruling class. Poor taste can seem a greater issue than greed, a small-town Babbitt a more despicable enemy than a robber baron. But Lewis never goes in to what really motivates even the follower in fascism: the aggression, economic insecurity, and scapegoating that can combine to make a rank-and-file Nazi or Tea Partier. His stormtroopers are vulgar rubes who dress in drag and blackface for “good, old-time Elks Club humor.” Jessup, the Vermonter who might as well have been Midwestern, thinks that those who “mind their own business” very likely rank higher in heaven than such “plumed souls” as the abolitionists.
     Lewis had interrupted his education at Yale to spend time in Upton Sinclair’s short-lived experimental community, the Helicon Home Colony, but it may be that neither Yale nor the communards transformed him altogether. I am pleased to report that he does declare for some sort of Cooperative Commonwealth at last which places his social thought still in advance of the early twenty-first century.


Wieland [Brown]

     A decent read yet today, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland resembles its British predecessors of earlier decades as an epistolary seduction novel while emphatically Gothic, like books in the more recent fashion.
     In the new American land, the author poises himself delicately between many of his oppositions. The Lockean reliance on perceptions is here traduced by false sense impressions while the pious man falls prey to monstrous delusion. The characters are only recent Americans with ties yet to Europe, and the action occurs in a kind of historic breather between the French and Indian and the Revolutionary Wars. The sensational Gothic side-show attractions of spontaneous combustion and “biloquism” are neither fully accounted for as in the Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural” nor are they as mysterious as in Walpole. The potential Eden of the American forest turns hellish. Its residents sidestep Europe’s centuries-long accretions of injustice only to enact a more monstrous scenario.
     The reader may wonder, though, whether Brown is in fact subtly playing both ends of these dualities or if he is simply careless. Carwin is never really motivated and Louisa is quite forgotten by her author (until the very end). The description is Romantic to a fault, but, especially when representing emotional states, it is repetitive and over-amplified.
     The book is particularly susceptible to self-reflective readings in which Carwin’s voices are a figure for the author’s speaking in the first-person narration. The plot depends on misunderstanding and missed communications as well as on things unknowable to the characters. In fact it is sufficiently underdetermined that the reader at the end is likely to feel unsatisfied.

Travelers [Marco Polo, Twain, Robert Byron]

The Travels of Marco Polo

     The book one generally encounters under the title The Travels of Marco Polo was, in fact, written by the traveler’s one-time cell-mate, Rustichello da Pisa in the Old French he used for romances. This volume, quite likely preserved only due to Messer Marco’s imprisonment, though from what must have been copious notes, enjoyed some circulation and a good many differing manuscripts with various titles are extant. The question is why it was not even more influential as it was clearly the most accurate and detailed account of the East during the second half of the Middle Ages.
     So very many of the marvels Marco tells are true, and the bits of myth and folklore that are reported as fact, generally in explicitly second-hand testimony, are themselves fascinating. Strikingly open-minded and tolerant, he makes a convincing case for Kublai Khan’s being the greatest emperor in history.
     Perhaps because he was no writer, apart from his openness, his text is generally egoless. The violent death of his comrades, a lengthy illness, a desert trek of the greatest rigor, none of these occupy more than a line. He is focused on the facts. Unfortunately, this orientation (and, it may be, the “as-told-to” form as well) leads to a book with no artful style whatever. It is as though his notes had been hastily strung together by a computer program, yet their inherent interest is such that the result is compelling reading.


The Innocents Abroad [Twain]

     Though Mark Twain’s ticket was paid by the newspapers for which he wrote, his party was an early group tour. The age of the old-style “grand tour” for upper-class men ended with the growth of the middle-class and the coming of railroads and commercial agencies like Cook’s to serve the new market for recreational travel. The Innocents Abroad, Twain’s account of his trip, was a best-seller as a mass audience began to relish foreign travel, though some did so only vicariously. It not only provided the equivalent of a set of stereopticon slides, but the exotic sights came with a narration bubbling over with recognizably American jokes.
     Twain’s subtitle The New Pilgrims’ Progress nicely suggests the replacement of the old Protestant ethic with consumerism while calling attention to several of the book’s governing oppositions: old and new, European and American, spiritual and worldly. The author ups his level of irony an extra notch in the Swiftian passage in Chapter 26 in which he speaks in the voice of an Italian returned from a visit to the United States, telling an incredulous audience of America’s modern farming methods, but also noting that, in this peculiar land across the sea, the people have the “effrontery” to conduct the affairs of government themselves and “you might fall from a third story window three several times, and not mash either a soldier or a priest.” He never fails to be amused at the abundant relics enshrined in Catholic churches, and he has a nice set-piece that moves from a description of the horrors of the Coliseum to the tortures of the Inquisition. His persona of the far Westerner who can know nothing of art oscillates between the comic rube and the child who points out that the emperor has no clothing.
     Though the trip was billed as “The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion” Twain claimed to find it more like a funeral procession due to the piety and advanced age of his fellow travelers. He says they would sometimes stray as close to sin as dominoes when in desperate need of recreation, but he found a few kindred spirits he liked to call “the boys,” with whom he could steal grapes after sneaking off to Athens in defiance of a quarantine.


The Road to Oxiana [Byron]

     Byron’s marvelous book, first published in 1937, might be called the first modern travel book (discounting the antiquarian preference for Smollett’s Sentimental Journey). Byron’s narration, dramatic though it be in its outlines, virtually always focuses, as the traveler does, on the accidental near-at-hand, the curiosae of every day abroad. His prose, itself a marvel, can make a spectacle of a plain. James Knox’s biography Robert Byron provides plenty of entertaining anecdotes of Bryon as a aesthete bound to shock. One sample will suffice: in Russia Byron’s Intourist guide doubted Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays saying they never could have been composed “by a grocer from Stratford-upon-Avon” provoking Byron to reply, “They are exactly the sort of plays I would expect a grocer to write.”
     His observations, reported conversations, and profound ironies are all delightful. His formal innovations brought a Modernist sensibility to travel writing with his use of fragments, ephemera, and documentary material. He provides one of the noblest jusfications for travel, to him a “spiritual necessity,” in First Russia, Then Tibet: “Yet for some persons there exists an organic harmony between all matter and all activity, whose discovery is the purpose of their lives and whose evidence, being inexhaustible, can only be selected by the good judgement and perpetual curiosity of the individual . . . He can know the world, in fact, only when he sees, hears, and smells it.” For some readers it will be enough recommendation that Bruce Chatwin regarded The Road to Oxiana as “a sacred text.”

Baby Boomer Reads the Beats

     The term baby boomer has been stretched these days to include people born as late as even 1960, but when I was very young people said simply “post-war baby.” My brother was a “war baby,” which sounded considerably more dashing, while my birth date – August 13, 1946 -- came almost exactly nine months after my father’s return from a devastated Europe.
     My parents had come from the rural Midwest, but I grew up in an affluent suburb where my father and the fathers of all my friends donned suits with starched white shirts and fedoras to board commuter trains to travel to their desks in the city. A boy seemed destined in those Eisenhower years to take The Road to Miltown and become The Organization Man, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The increasing prosperity that continued for twenty-five years after WWII and the dominant role the USA had come to play in the world allowed many Americans to feel life was good in spite of racism and the threat of nuclear holocaust.
     A number of us middle-class laddies had been instilled with a love of reading with the encouragement of mothers who figured education would guarantee us our place in the grand American sun. I was among the many of my generation who proceeded to discover fascinating realms, both revealing and transgressive, in recent American writing. Though I got into everything from Gilgamesh to Updike, from Zhuangzi to Achebe, I do recall the unique excitement of finding in Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Corso a sensibility in which I felt at home (though I would not say, and I hope I do not hear for yet another time “Reading On the Road changed my life”). When The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 came out, I discovered further new directions. I read and reread Allen’s anthology and wrote to the small presses listed in the back to buy texts that allowed even a suburban bourgeois to feel hip.
     I was excited not merely by seeing voices in print that supported my views of art, vision, revolution, sex and love, and altered consciousness. I loved the return to the performative in poetry, to readings, with or without music, sometimes using the loping declamatory line of Ginsberg’s great long poems. I was charmed by the use of the personal in poetry – poems that mentioned friends as Sappho, the troubadours, and the Dadaists had done. The new poets’ pure joy of language seemed to me the very foundation of the aesthetic utterance, and my friends and I reenacted “Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway” while wandering suburban streets where few pedestrians passed. I couldn’t get over the Whitmanic catalogues in “Canticle for the Waterbirds,” the Wolfean rhapsodies in Kerouac, or the stately cadences of Robert Duncan.
     At the age of twelve I read copies of Paul Krassner’s The Realist a subversive high school teacher risked firing by giving to my brother. I devoured Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (1959) which included “The White Negro.” I listened to jazz and blues, but also to transparent red lp recordings from Fantasy in Berkeley featuring Ferlinghetti and Rexroth.
     Paul Carroll’s Big Table originated in the banned issue featuring Kerouac and Burroughs (1959 again) of the Chicago Review. Carroll proceeded not only to put out four more issues that maintained the high standards of the first, but also hosted a poetry reading series at the Second City on Monday evenings which the owners must have figured would be a small loss even if audiences were few. I attended these readings as a teenager, hearing some great writers while sipping the over-priced non-alcoholic beverages that bought the customer a table for the evening. (I recall several years later feeling similarly uneasy in Greenwich Village’s Gaslight.)
     I began my work in literary translation with a particular admiration for Kenneth Rexroth as an exemplar of a tradition at once scholarly and creative, erudite yet rebellious, descending from Ezra Pound and extending on to Paul Blackburn and, I felt, to me. Yet I have written almost nothing on the Beats; I always felt they were too intimate, too close to being me and my friends to analyze from the outside.
    Later, during the 70s, I was involved with with Kush (Steven Kushner), Artful Goodtimes (Bontempi) and others in the Cloud House group in San Francisco which maintained a poetry gallery storefront and practiced guerrilla poetry techniques, principally street readings. Cloud House also sought out old North Beach poets, some fallen into SRO hotel isolation, for the mutual benefit of two generations of the hip. In this way I met people like Kirby Doyle, who had appeared in both Allen’s anthology and Carroll’s banned Chicago Review and had published his own collection Sapphobones. As the earth’s turned, he gave work to the Haight’s Communications Company and lived in communes in Marin County. Michael McClure said of him in memoriam, “Kirby was the gentle, human lion and pater familias of this scene [speaking of 1958] which was as close to magic as anyone could get.”
     Bob Kaufman used to hang out at Cloud House as well, dear Bob Kaufman who eschewed publication and when young offered his poems in his original poet’s voice to drivers whose windows were, in those days without air-conditioning, open, whether their minds were or not. His vow of silence had ended by the time of Cloud House but he had little to say. He had, I suppose, become accustomed to spreading his beatitude silently. And there were others less celebrated. I recall an old amphetamine veteran who mumbled so that we often could not understand him, but we knew he had been through much, and understood.

      We drove up to Elymakee, Gary Snyder’s place in the Sierras above Nevada City, twenty miles off the nearest paved road, but neighbor to Allen Ginsberg’s property and the tracts belonging to various gurus, devotees, and literary hangers-on, where we read under the full moon and a Tibetan flag.
     The performance poetry scene is clear in its Beat lineage, and all of us who have striven to restore poetry to its traditional place in the air recognize what a dramatic shift it was in the 50s for poetry readings to appear apart from universities with their occasional literary stars and ongoing pin-striped faculty readings. In bars and cafes, book stores and living rooms, poetry became not only audible but also participatory. Everyone who had taken the trouble to chase after the words had a vision to relate. The open reading is an integral part of contemporary poetry series. The boorish sometimes arrive after the main reading is nearly done, and the slightly less boorish come on time but page through their own work while the featured reader is on. And all this surely happened during the 1950s as well. But everyone understands that we are all the children of the Beats; we remember how one after another, the practitioners of tight and intellectual verses like (Robert Lowell) were converted to free composition and to freer statement of what most needed to be said. It is difficult for younger people to whom the Beats are simply a literary chapter to realize the scorn and derision these writers attracted when they were themselves younger. Were they the last literary generation with the ability to shock?
     To me, a most engaged partisan especially in my callow years, the Beats were the most recent team fielded by the Dionysians whose competition with the Apollonians had always to be refought on the printed page as well as in our minds. Perhaps I am a typical sexagenarian in that I find myself these days reading more old books than new, but the Beat writers I encountered in my prepubescence have never lost their savor. I don’t doubt that the weakness is mine if I have found so little later writing that for me says as much as well.
     This reaction is not inevitable, though. I was visiting the home of a Southern California super-affluent cousin of my wife’s when the alienated teen-age son who secluded himself to listen to Kurt Cobain excused himself from going out for dinner by saying he had to do a report for English. Incommunicative as he had been, I though we might have a bit of common ground, and I asked his assigned topic. “Awww, it’s just some boring book my English teacher gave us,” he said. “What’s the title?” I pressed on. “Some stupid thing I’m supposed to read . . . it’s called On the Road.”

Ambivalence in Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence

     Most people have a decided preference for Paradise Lost over Paradise Regained and for the Inferno over Purgatorio or Paradiso. Blake’s explanation of this phenomenon in Milton would doubtless do for Dante as well: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
     Similarly, the first Canto of Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence, describing a sort of land of all play and no work, will strike the common reader as markedly livelier, more precise, and more beautiful than the second in which the noble knight Industry prevails. One of the last of the dream visions, composed in belated pre-Romantic archaizing diction and expert use of Spenserian stanzas, the poem details the dangers of indolence. The usage of that term in Thomson’s poem comprehends not merely selfish laziness and the extreme of accidie, long recognized as sinful, but threatens to extend to much of what might seem innocent pleasure, as well as to love and art. The simpler delights of indolence, though, begin with comfortable clothing. (XXVI) Even “repose of mind” of a sort associated with Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Buddhism is praised by the wizard of Indolence (XVI) as though mental equanimity could be born of pure idleness.
     In spite of his clear condemnation, the poet expatiates lovingly on the delights of the Castle which, in fact, operates on the rule of the Abbey of Thélème (and Drop City): “do what you will.” (XXVIII) The luxury is Oriental “Soft quilts on quilts, on carpets carpets spread,” (XXXIII), a richness like the “gay spendour” of “Caliphs old.” (XLII)
     The poet’s pose of moral rigor appears in a world so severely problematized as to be almost unlivable. The Castle of Indolence opens in a soporific dreamland of pastoralism in which, contrary to the experience of farmers of all ages, the very sound of the countryside “inclinèd all to sleep.” (IV) Yet the alternative seems to be an even uglier “savage thirst of gain” causing the rivers to run with blood. (XI) The crystal ball which, like Borge’s Aleph reflects the entire world, is called “Of Vanity the Mirror” (L) as though there were nothing further of any significance to be seen. It displays a miserly drudge at work, a spendthrift fool, quarrelsome academics (L-LII) and, vainest of all, war. (LV) Creation belongs to the devil, and his name is not Wickedness but Indolence.
     Reality, then, is so very dreary that Morpheus’ dreams are always “gayer.” (XLIV) All the ease-seeking “pilgrims” drink from the fountain of Nepenthe, implying that each must bear a burden in life as onerous as recollections of the Trojan War to its veterans in the tales of “Dan Homer.” Like Helen’s guests, it seems only forgetfulness under the influence of a strong narcotic can free one from “vile earthly care” and open the possibility of joy (XXVII). (Od. 4.220–221)
     Given an all-but-intolerable world, indolence, if a vice, is a charming and seductive one. Author and reader may linger in delectation of its joys, yet must condemn it in the end, just as the Pearl-Poet’s medieval Clannesse exhibited the side-show decadence of Sodom only to point a respectable churchly moral, and the New York Post allows its readers to observe the misdeeds of others without ethical peril. This leads to Thomson’s many lyrical nature passages as well as such shocking thrills as the dungeon (LXXIII) and the amazing stampede of hogs at the end. (Canto 2, LXXXI)
     But the empire of Thomson’s wizard includes territory beyond what is ordinarily considered the “failing” of indolence. Love, for instance, appears under his auspices only as aggression against a hypnotized maiden, who “sighing yields her up to love’s delicious harms” (XXIII) presumably because it would be too much trouble to be other than complaisant.
     Thomson’s persona would have the reader believe that Beauty has “a pale-faced court” (LXXI) whose “only labour was to kill the time.” (LXXII) The text, itself a poem and thus a “killer of time,” presents the villain, the wizard of Indolence, singing to his “enfeebling lute” (VIII, 8) as part of his snares to capture the unwary. In his song, stanzas IX-XIX, he promises that only he can relieve people’s weariness and sorrow, providing instead a “sea/ Of full delight.” (XII) Poetry and idleness are conflated, reminding one of Huizinga’s insistance that “Poiesis, in fact, is a play-function. It proceeds within the play-ground of the mind, in a world of its own which the mind creates for it.” [Homo Ludens p. 119] Thomson’s wizard offers an escape from the sordid routines of practical life devoted to self-advancement: business (“to cheat, and dun, and lie, and visit pay”), law (whose practitioners “Prowl in courts of law for human prey”), or politics ( “In venal senate thieve”). All these are equated, in the end, with crime, with those who “rob on broad highway.” (XIII)
     The vanity of poetry is represented by the “man of special grave remark” who sang as sweetly as a morning-lark yet who “buried” these talents, (LVII) preferring to ramble among the flowers. Studying the heavens, he constructs “ten thousand glorious systems,” yet allows these “great ideas” to vanish without action. (LIX) There is a nature poet who visits, but will not remain, in the Castle’s precincts (LXV) and another, too lazy to actually write. (LVIII) The fruitlessness of these artists’ lives is mirrored in others: an unkempt recluse (LXI), a hedonist (LXII), hypocritical clergy (LXIX), and politicians (LXX).
     Only the idle poet who has renounced the common goal “to heap up estate” (XIX) can attain that dubious “repose of mind,” a condition in which emotion is tamed and decorative, tending to please rather than “torture” or “deform” man. (XVI) In practice the transmutation of reality in art is what makes life livable, or, at any rate, worth living.
     Acceptable to many readers as the point may be, it is itself delivered as part of a “witching song.” (XX) There can be no doubt about the diabolical and deceptive character of the “watchful wicked wizard” who snatches victims with his “unhallowed paw” to sequester within the “cursèd gate.” (XXII)
     The contradiction persists to the end. In the second Canto, Industry is the antidote to the evils of Indolence, yet, if one works only to acquire goods, what of the dark picture of the resulting vicious competition in Canto 1? This noble knight displays his prowess in successful practice of the arts. (2, VII) Where then is the condemnation of poetry as vain?
     The literary text has extraordinary capacity to express opposition, ambivalence, contradiction, and indeterminacy. Thomson’s poem is the most accurate embodiment of the problematic, conflicted dualities from which people generate the activities of daily life. I myself and may be the reader as well, walk a ridgepole. In my own case, delighting in Thomson’s “soft-tinkling streams” (XLIII), and impatient with the drudgework of writing in the hours before I head off to a foreign land, I suppose I am one with the “bristly swine” (Canto 2, LXXXI) of the poem’s conclusion. Yet, at the same time, as constructor of this essay (as Thomson was of his poem and you of your reading), I also resemble the heroic Knight of Arts and Industry. The tension between the two is as essential to life as the Fall to history, positive electrical charge to negative, or, for all I know, matter to anti-matter. Out of this delicate balance emerges a new poem, a new reading, a new thought.

Notes on Recent Reading 6 [Jewett, Addison, Crabbe]

Country of the Pointed Firs [Jewett]

     Reading Jewett one thinks of William Carlos Williams’ line in “To Elsie”: “The pure products of America/ go crazy—“ Though Jewett’s bona fides as an old-line downeaster are impeccable, she writes as though the region was populated entirely by eccentrics with the exception of the normative detached narrator. Just as pastoral poetry was originally written by urbanites amusing themselves with a mythological projection of country life, the late nineteenth century regional American writers virtually all wrote from a doubled perspective: familiar with the local culture yet not contained within it.
     Indeed, Jewett marvels at what she sees of “the waste of human ability” along the Maine coast where individuals are stranded like sea-wrack. A person in a small town may have “a fine able character” yet feel “caged” by “a narrow set of circumstances.” (467) A devolution has occurred: the earlier generations were “more vigorous.” (473) When the chunky Mrs. Todd is compared to Antigone (417), Jewett is plainly playing an endgame of belated epigones. The poignancy of her one romance and the dull marriage that followed is sentimental rather than tragic. Her plodding tidy decent endurance, however admirable, falls far short of heroic.
     In historic terms, many of the odd characters that populate Dunnet’s Landing testify to the passing of the old order in which sea captains not only commanded a prosperous industry but also brought a cosmopolitan viewpoint to an otherwise small and isolated seacoast town. Travelers know that the economic backwaters are always the most colorful tourist destinations, and, in spite of her own Maine origins, Jewett, like her narrator from Boston, was just passing through.


Cato [Addison]

     Joseph Addison’s play was a hit when it premiered in 1713. Written to conform to the neoclassical literary theory of the sort advocated by Thomas Rymer, it set the standard for a generation of tragedies and maintained its popularity on the stage well into the nineteenth century. Since that time, despite academic interest and occasional revivals, it has lingered in some obscurity while the author’s marvelous essays, casual and elegant at once, have always commanded readers.
     Addison’s blank verse is pallid compared to Shakespeare, but whose is not? Cato the Stoic (great-grandson of the Censor) speaks in a rhetoric that is nothing if not dignified, uplifted with sublime sentiment. The listener can only be charmed by the self-abnegating virtues of the hero. The love interests of Marcus, Portius, and Juba are adventitious; what the play presents is the grandeur of tragic submission, contemptuous of mere passion. Though Cato must argue himself into acceptance of immortality, noting, in a line later quoted by the pleasant Mr. Micawber, “Plato, thou reasonest well,” his detachment from desire and devotion to others are exemplary.
     The more-or-less “natural religion” of Stoicism was not the only reason Cato was the rage in the Enlightenment era. Addison was an active Whig, and participated in the struggle to decrease the prerogatives of the monarchy. His play was read as part of a developing critique of tyranny that impressed both American and French revolutionaries. George Washington, in fact, had the play performed for the troops at Valley Forge. Cato himself had been elected plebian tribune and had, with Cicero, opposed the patrician Catiline conspiracy, and so might be regarded as something of a progressive. At any rate the old Stoic is surely innocent of the fact that his name is used today by rightwing sycophants of our own tyrannical Caesar, the corporate dollar.


Collected Poems [Crabbe]

     We tend to accept the idea of the penniless poet as natural, though the poor had little voice until the Romantic movement created a new interest in the lives of the humble and an audience for poets like Burns, Crabbe, and Clare who had themselves experienced real privation. For a man like Crabbe, the English countryside inspired neither the confectionary fantasies of classical pastoralism nor the mystical afflatus of Wordsworth. Like American writers a hundred years or so later such as Edwin Arlington Robinson or Edgar Lee Masters, he described struggles and dramas taking place far from the centers of power, often with a dark or tragic tone.
     In Byron’s phrase, Crabbe was “Nature’s severest painter, yet her best,” and The Borough, The Village, and “Sir Eustace Grey” remain worth reading for their psychology and pathos. The tales in verse are well-shaped and satisfying, even if most would agree with Émile Legouis’ observation that “His ear has no fastidious requirement.”
     As much a poet of depression as of rural life, it is no wonder that some categorize him as a pre-Romantic, yet Leavis places him last of the Augustan Tradition, and Horace Smith called him “Pope in worsted stockings.” Though he says he “sought the simple life that Nature yields” it was in fact his circumstance from birth, and it is to his credit that he set down as much of its horror as of its picturesque charm. He was a competent craftsman, and in his often easy-going heroic couplets (sometimes ballad-like stanzas), if he rarely comes up with striking images or thrilling thoughts (we are no longer impressed with his sententiae), he sustains a consistent simmer of interest and generally hits his mark. While he rarely soared, he regularly looked closely at his surroundings, material and emotional, and recorded what he saw in carefully wrought language.

Notes on Recent Reading 5 [Deeds of God in Rddhipur, Burney, Cooper]

The Deeds of God in Rddhipur, translated by Anne Feldhaus

     This 13th century devotional text, translated from Marathi, records anecdotes of the life of Gundam Raul, regarded as divine by followers of the Mahanubhava sect. This school, like Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other movements, split from Hinduism, objecting to the traditional pantheon of divinities, the caste system, and the stress of ritual purity and precisely performed sacrifices. The Mahanubhavas are virtually monotheistic and their divine Raul provocatively violated caste and ritual rules.
     The book consists of 323 short chapters recounting incidents in Gundam Raul’s life. Some are the ordinary stuff of hagiography; miracles including raising the dead, controlling the weather, bringing prosperity to those in his vicinity, and sometimes simply glowing with numinous light. But this is commonplace, universal stuff. What marks Gundam Raul’s particularity is his apparent madness. Apart from his intentional violation of caste, he is constantly playing with sacred images, pretending to ride horses that are really rocks; he scolds a squeaky gate and his own rear end for their noises; he loves food and is not above snatching sweets from others. The locals are sometimes moved to declare, “The Raul is mad, the Raul is possessed.” The book is a lively and entertaining account of the career of a figure whom might equally be viewed as a lunatic or as an enlightened reformer who used theatrical means to bring others wisdom.
     Feldhaus does a tasteful job of editing, providing useful background and analysis but in no way overdetermining her readers’ responses. Apart from providing useful information specific to medieval India, her comments led me to read about St. Simeon Salos, the patron of “holy fools” and puppeteers, for, I believe, the first time. His story is a partial corrective for anyone thinking there is no analogue for the Raul or for mad Chinese mountain sages in Christian tradition.


Burney’s Evelina

     Though it may seem to have close affinities to Richardson’s novels due to its epistolary form and its theme of a distressed young lady (familiar also from Perils of Pauline and Yuan Dynasty drama), Burney’s novel is ever so much funnier. Evelina is so artificial – surpassingly lovely and motivated by the highest morality, yet often paralyzed by social anxiety and quite passive -- her very helplessness is a sort of absurd exemplar of the restrictions on women in her day. If the jokes such as the Captain’s xenophobia become a bit repetitive, so were most people’s favorite bits of Seinfeld. The same circumlocutions that express the delicacy and sentiment of the Rev. Villars or Lord Orville make Sir Clement ridiculous. The book is as well an example of the common literary dodge of portraying forbidden material by making it, at the end, a negative example, as, in the 14th century Cleanness exhibited the dreadful doings of the Sodomites for readers both to savor and condemn. The author is then not only blameless, but improving to her audience.
     The book throughout is comic from Villars’ too-serious (though highly emotional) tone to the marvelous expedient of the old ladies’ race and the ape at the end. Extraordinary coincidences shape the plot from the secret of the heroine’s birth to her chance meetings with her grandmother, brother, and foster sister in turn. Evelina has been read as a sly feminist heroine with Villars as the self-righteous chauvinist heavy, but surely the extreme characterizations are intended as just. Though often paralyzed by self-consciousness, she is the soul of virtue, her innocence and naïveté impenetrable. He is unfailingly high-minded and responsible, a model of sensibility in his devotion to his oh-so-feminine step-daughter.
     Burney has great fun mocking Mme. Duval and the Brangtons, but their deepest sin seems not to be their thoughtlessness but their vulgarity. Lord Orville, on the other hand, must be rich and noble and good, but what matters is his courtly manner, inherited from the Renaissance ideal of the courtier as a sophisticated and sensitive lover. It is this primarily that excites Evelina’s admiration of his manly and genteel behavior. In this aesthetic standard the lower classes have very little place. Given sufficient education, keeping a low profile, they might be more or less respectable.
     The author and her circle would have had no difficulty in recognizing Sir Clement’s note (purporting to be from Lord Orville) as an “outrageous, a wanton insult” utterly reversing Evelina’s good opinion. The note (which had been designed to offend) merely offered to correspond and expressed affection, but, in a cultural context of fetishized virginity and modesty, with the parameters for proper courtship rigorously defined, any violation signified barbarity, a failure of style but likely a giveaway to base motives as well. It’s a good thing Burney made a joke of the scene, though she had little choice but to live it as well.


Cooper’s Home as Found

     Readers of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales will be forgiven for finding the chief appeal of those works in the mythic frontiersman and his Indian side-kick, a pair of a type known through American literature. Each plot, however, has a respectable couple to provide a conventional love story rather like the Marx brothers used to do. In Home as Found these less interesting characters are the entire novel, but, fortunately, given the field, they have divided themselves into the truly genteel and the objects of satire. We can delight in the sharp satire of what he called “this malign influence,” America’s cash-driven “mania” which “has so destroyed the usual balance of things, and money has got to be so completely the end of life, that few think about it as a means. In these days of right-wing demagoguery, I can even sympathize with his observation that “men have got to be afraid to speak the truth, when that truth is a little beyond the common apprehension.” He is on the mark as well about Americans’ restless instability, moving among places (notably Westward) and classes.
     The fact is, that, though a major mythographer of America’s frontier, Cooper remained a convinced aristocrat. To Cooper, in spite of the class mixing that may have necessarily occurred in early days, once the land is settled, only a “gentleman” could possess “dignity and fair-mindedness.” Even the foolish and vulgar Aristabulus Bragg, had he only been brought up in “a better sphere,” might have improved and “most probably would have formed a gentleman, a scholar, and one who could have contributed largely to the welfare and tastes of his fellow-creatures.” For many years Cooper’s popularity was far greater abroad (where he lived for some years) than at home. No wonder he quarreled with the American public throughout his life.

Notes on Recent Reading 4 (Sarah Scott, Madam de La Fayette, Wharton]

Sarah Scott’s Millenium (sic) Hall

     Scott’s 1762 novel attracts attention primarily due to its subject matter. In recent decades its depiction of an all-female utopia has justifiably enjoyed considerable attention from feminist critics, but Scott’s themes are more revealing and complex than some reductive summaries might suggest.
     The women of the Millenium Hall commune (critics generally use the original edition’s spelling) live a life in many ways entirely rational. They spend their time in fully human activities, pursuing the arts in an Edenic setting. Each is a refugee from the persecutions of men and each has found, in female affection and support, satisfaction otherwise unavailable. In fact the place has the air of blithe eighteenth century Enlightenment absoluteness: the women, the reader is told, are altogether harmonious. With the conflicts occasioned by gender removed, they can enjoy daily happiness. Passion appears invariably accompanied by error at the least and very often wickedness. The few satisfactory marriages one glimpses are wholly cerebral. Though love between men and women seems virtually always harmful, among the women one hears no hint of lesbianism. The author herself had a very brief disastrous marriage and a longterm relationshop with Lady Barbara Montagu (sometimes considered co-author) during which they put into practice many of the ideas suggested in the novel.
     Nonetheless, Scott is socially conservative enough to present the ladies as endorsing marriage as a general rule and assisting others in finding proper matches even while rejecting life with a man for themselves. Chastity and sexual reputation have such importance in their minds that one woman actually accepts a mismatched marriage rather than allowing a wholly untrue rumor to circulate.
     Indeed, the bliss of Millenium Hall is such that the place might seem as though it must have the ennui of Eden as well as its charms. The critic seeking a route to social reform might note that each woman has come with an independent fortune -- it is markedly easier to construct a utopia if one need not bother about anyone’s earning a living. Still, even the ladies’ sometimes absurd gentility may be read as a response to the very real economic domination of men.
     Radical as it may be in some of the claims on behalf of women, the book is scrupulously conservative in essentials: for instance, claiming that while “every station has its duties, those of the great are more various than those of their inferiors.” Scott’s conservatism is even stronger in matters of religion. Far from ideas like eighteenth century deism, Scott advances a wholly confident orthodoxy, often invoked to place the seal of undeniable truth on the ladies’ contentions. Their spirituality is shallow with one exception: they are philanthropic, helping their poorer neighbors (while not questioning the class system). This benevolence is the most certain evidence of their Christian virtue. In contrast, the sympathetic male narrator has just returned from the slave plantations of the Indies where he made his fortune never, apparently, thinking of the well-being of the workers.
     The narratives of the lives of the groups’ members, while programmatically determined, are often similar to the incidents in novels like Richardson’s. Seductive aggressive males, fainting females, marriage, money, and class generate the incidents. In this way the book conforms to the “conduct novel” which, by setting forth exemplary behavior, both to be emulated and avoided, anticipates the self-help genre which occupies so many best-seller notches today.


de La Fayette’s Princess de Clèves

     More a soap opera than a roman d’analyse, Princess de Clèves depicts a world in which the courtiers spend their time in elaborate intrigues, pursuing power and sex, because they have nothing else to do. However deceitful and selfish their methods, they have exquisitely developed sensibilities. It’s like a despiritualized Genji where every act is a theatrical gesture and refinement is cultivated by all. Vanity here presents in one of its purest forms. Surely the idlers who filled the courts of many absolute monarchs in all parts of the world must have similarly passed their time seeking pleasure while pursuing the more serious occupation of jockeying for influence by backstabbing and lying.
     In this context the heroine is the exception. She excels in every quality admired by the nobles around her. In fact, an annoying habit of the author is to use empty superlatives. Not Madame de Clèves alone, but many characters are the noblest, the most handsome, charming, witty, yet the reader is given virtually no specific detail to make these grand abstractions imaginable. These are less descriptions of individual than they are rhapsodies for beauty that is too beautiful to be quite real.
     Unfortunately for Madame de Clèves, she is also too good to survive. In an amoral court, she is incongruous. Having entered a loveless marriage with little hesitation, she then insists on being faithful, eventually dying for virtue (as her long-suffering husband had done before her). The one who inspired her passionate unfulfilled love, the Duc de Nemours, one learns in a one-sentence paragraph, found that time ameliorated his loss and his love faded.
     The narrative, far from being a psychological masterpiece as some have said, strikes me as melodramatic and sentimental. The court’s aesthetes appreciate their own reaction more than the object of their contemplation. Nonetheless, the reader must admire the novel’s brevity, structure, and the lofty pitch of its abstract ideals.


Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed

     Oddly, toward the end of her career, Edith Wharton produced a work that looks very much like someone else’s first novel, a Bildingsroman (more specifically a Künstlerroman) about an sensitive but awkward Midwesterner experiencing a love-tragedy amid the pretentious New Yorkers. Unlike most critics, Wharton thought this one of her best works. For me the satiric material on the Middle West, reminiscent of Floyd Dell or Sinclair Lewis, is awkwardly done and fits poorly into the plot. For a college graduate in the twenties, with or without literary interests, to take the temple at Delphi for a Christian Science Church, as Weston does, is not quite believable. Similarly, Wharton’s treatment of “modern” styles in fiction has aged poorly. One hears of “pure manly stories of young fellows prospecting in the Yukon” [London] and “descriptions of corrupt society people” [Wharton]. Rauch and his Voodoo poems sound like e. e. cummings with their tradition under a show of modernism, and I suppose Weston himself is based on Wolfe. But where is the strong mainline of modernism, Eliot, Pound, Stein, Joyce? The writers here seem like a shallow bunch. Vernon Lee criticized the book for its “cult chat,” but it is hard to associate these paper dolls with real writers.
     Significantly, the descriptions of Vance’s blockages are okay, while his transports are weak. In fact all the rhapsodies of nature and of psychology sound flat to my ears, and the view of writer as unique seer badly puffed up. The vague concept of “Mothers” is perhaps meant to demonstrate the young writer’s intuitive brilliance, but it sounds rather silly instead. Wharton’s images too often seem like Weston’s, such as the self-dramatizing of feeling “handcuffed and chained” to one’s life.
     The sentimental plot, generated by the virtuous self-control of Halo Spear and Vance Weston, is about to conclude in a conventional happy ending, when, in the space between the beginning and the end of the very last sentence Wharton’s tone switches. At first it seems the two, now each freed of their marriages, can find their destiny with each other: “And when at last he drew her arm through his and walked beside her in the darkness.” Without warning, Vance’s alienation returns: “the creator of imaginary beings must always feel alone.”
     Though myself a “raw product of a Middle-Western town,” I found her literati to be reductive even as caricatures and the love story emotionally simple, which is to say sentimental. I imagine the sequel, The Gods Arrive, is more of the same, but I rather doubt I shall ever find out.