My copy of Tales of the Alhambra is, as I note at the outset, an odd edition, published by Editorial Padre Suarez of Granada and unlikely to be available to anyone else. The page numbers in parentheses are thus likely to be of little use. In order to allow the reader to locate the passages I cite, I have therefore appended a list of the chapters from which each quotation is taken.
I have just been reading Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra out loud with my wife. Our copy is, fittingly, I think, not a scholarly Library of America volume, but an undated octavo souvenir edition printed in Granada at least eighty years ago which includes many engravings which look as though they were quite old when the book was printed. It fits neatly into a pocket, and its ideas slide as easily into the mind. The author prefers to soothe rather than to disturb his reader. Irving shares with Hawthorne and Cooper the early development of specifically American writing, but Irving’s tone is altogether different from either of his fellow-countrymen. Whereas Hawthorne brooded on colonial history with a consciousness haunted by self-doubt and intimations of guilt, and Cooper spun tales of the frontier recast into morality plays like the later ones of the Old West, Irving provided considerably lighter fare. Just as his best-known works, the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” made blithe entertainments spinning out the amusing if inconsequential lives of New York’s earlier inhabitants, his Tales of the Alhambra does much the same for both the Moors and Christians of Spain.
Part of the Romantic program, of course, was the celebration of the ethnic and the regional, and there can be no doubt of Irving’s contribution to the development of national consciousness. Yet his work contrasts with Byron’s titanic anti-heroes, Wordsworth’s nature enthusiasms, Coleridge’s transcendental flights, and Keats’ almost painful aestheticism. He is perhaps closest to Scott’s rummaging in his country’s history for narrative, but, though Scott’s novels always turn out well with a satisfying round of retributive justice, this happens only after what seem genuine bumps and obstacles along the way. Irving is dedicated to writing that raises no dangerous or uncomfortable issue and explores no dark corners of human nature. Even pathos evaporates under his warm benevolent gaze; his greatest seriousness is likely to take the form of sentiment.
Irving’s tone is fixed at the outset. In his dedication to David Wilkie he says they had been impressed as fellow travelers with the persistence of Islamic influence in Spain, and his friend urged him to “write something that should illustrate those peculiarities, something in the Haroun Alraschid styles, [sic] that should have a dash of that Arabian spice which pervades everything in Spain.” Further, he inscribes his volume of “arabesque sketches” to his friend “as a memorial of the pleasant scenes we have witnessed together in that land of adventure.” (13) As the Abbasid al-Rashid ruled in Baghdad (and Raqqa) far from Andalusia which had been conquered for the Ummayad dynasty by the Berber Tariq ibn Ziyad, the reference must be understood as a broad, unfocused reference to Islam in general. The blurring is significant. For Irving that entire tradition -- cultural, spiritual, and military -- is reduced to a dash of spice to awaken the flagging relish of his reader or to an exotic decorative motif, in fact, an arabesque. Doubtless he would have treated Indian or Chinese culture in just the same way.
Apart from the lure of the exotic, the book is animated by a mild if enthusiastic devotion to romantic love. Thus, after describing the Hall of the Two Sisters, Irving does not allow his account of its rich ornamentation to stand alone. He goes on, “It is impossible to contemplate this once favourite abode of Oriental manners without feeling the early association of Arabian romance, and almost expecting to see the white arm of some mysterious princess beckoning from the balcony or some dark eye sparkling through the lattice. (47)
Similar foggy fantasies regularly reappear. For instance, in the Court of the Lions “it needs but a slight exertion of the fancy to picture some pensive beauty of the harem, loitering in these secluded haunts of Oriental luxury.” (88) We are not far from the nineteenth century paintings of odalisques by Ingres and others.
In this aesthetic the very vagueness of these sirens constitutes a good portion of their charm. The allure of such undifferentiated heroines provides the impetus for such narrations as that of Ahmed al Kamel or the three beautiful princesses. Love generally triumphs and, if it does not, one can breathe a heart-felt if pleasant sigh and proceed to the next attraction on the agenda. Though he actually lived for a time in the Alhambra, Irving remains a true package-tour visitor, satisfied with curiosities and a marvel or two without looking very deeply into history, art, or human psychology.
Through the rose-colored glasses of the tourist “everything here appears calculated to inspire kind and happy feelings, for everything is delicate and beautiful. “ (88) The unfocused fuzziness of these adjectives is deliberate. Irving’s rhetoric is altogether conventional and most easily digestible with hardly an original turn. He is a comfortable author providing a very modest but also reliable positive sensation. The psychologists tell us that a similar dependable reward causes people to turn in idle moments to television or Facebook.
Yet the values are consistently and distinctly Romantic. Rather than the orderly garden, Irving appreciates the belated, almost post-apocalyptic wildness of a scene of departed grandeur. “In the present instance the effect was heightened by the wild and lonely nature of the place. We were on the naked and broken summit of the haunted Mountain of the Sun, where ruined tanks and cisterns and the mouldering foundations of extensive buildings spoke of former populousness, but where all was now silent and desolate.” (123)
As a tourist, he enjoys the temporary novelty of the scenes he visits while never doubting the superiority of his own culture. On his way the “sturdy Biscayan lad” he has hired as guide strikes him as “vain-glorious” (23), though he is “faithful, cheery, kind-hearted.” His condescending attitude is explicit in his naming the man Sancho after Don Quixote’s sidekick.
The same attitude recurs when he hires the “son of the Alhambra” Mateo Jimenez. His “valet, cicerone, guide, guard, and historiographic squire” (a partially submerged reference to Cervantes), a tout of the sort familiar to everyone who travels in poorer countries, represents his stance toward the country as a whole. He finds this “alert and officious wight” (64) “”at times an amusing companion; he is simple-minded and of infinite good humour with the loquacity and gossip of a village barber.” (65) Jimenez is diminished in just the same way the entire country, its history, and the human emotions of love and aggression are here declawed, tamed and rendered fit to divert the reader.
The volume ends with one of the most conventional of travelogue motifs, the setting sun, as the writer notes “thus ended one of the pleasantest dreams of a life which the reader perhaps may think has been but too much made up of dreams.” (354) Yet such a conclusion is a cliché because it is satisfying in a mild but reliable way. Even as dream, Irving’s portrait of Spain has nothing of the haunting power of many actual dreams; it is rather a easeful reverie, a recreation. The book is a breezy pleasure, and any pleasure is valuable and worth preserving. Thus we read Irving for one of the most important though little honored reasons for art: to pass the time.
Chapter list for cited quotations
13 dedication
47 “Interior of the Alhambra”
88 ”The Court of Lions”
123 “A Ramble Among the Hills”
23 “The Journey”
64 “The Household”
65 “The Household”
354 “The Author’s Farewell to Granada”
Friday, September 1, 2017
Tuesday, August 1, 2017
The Mule in Blues Imagery
Poetry typically contains a far greater concentration of rhetorical figures than prose. Figures of speech, thought, and sound regularly heighten the reader’s pleasure as well as refining the theme and tone. Each metaphor is a tiny riddle, the sudden solution of which provides a pleasure similar to that of many jokes. A sense of an exhilarated dance of ideas may be created by systematic image systems. But such figures are not mere ornamental decoration. They also allow the expression of new ideas and subtle shades of familiar ones. Rather than obscuring content, they render it precise.
Since the Romantic era, critics have celebrated “innovation” to the disadvantage of tradition. The use of such conventional images has been criticized as unimaginative, but a close study indicates that even when frequently used, a good poet will find the potential in such convention not only for considerable latitude, but even for eloquence.
One rhetorical device is allusion. Within every body of poetry, be it ancient Greek epic, troubadour lyric, or Elizabethan sonnets, certain poetic figures recur, building an ever-greater matrix of meaning. In the country blues tradition, one of the most beautiful and powerful bodies of American lyric in the first half of the twentieth century, a good many metaphors reflect the rural setting in which the songs were composed. With loving affection women are sometimes described as cows, while men may be compared to roosters. Another beast that occurs in a substantial number of early blues songs is the mule, the common work animal of the South. In a broad, though not inclusive, sample mules, which the listener might expect to be something of a cliché with a set, decodable meaning, in fact occupy a broad semantic field with a variety of implications. [1] Sometimes, indeed, they are the basis for set formulae which correspond more closely to popular ideas of a literary convention, while other uses are anomalous or unique.
In general the image of a mule is employed by the musician-poets of the genre with rich flexibility. One finds characteristics associated with the animal that are familiar to even contemporary urbanites such as stubbornness, industriousness, and a powerful kick, but even these are far from identical in context.
One dramatic evidence for the image’s versatility is its near equal use to describe men and women. [2] In the songs in which the mule is identified with a man, the singer may refer to the mule's stubbornness as when Barefoot Bill in “From Now On” sings “I’m going to “act just like a doggone mule.” A number of songs note the mule’s untiring capacity for labor. For instance, Blind Blake in his “Good-Bye Mama Moan” claims to his credit that ““I been your hard-working mule,” and Washboard Sam promises “I’ll work like a doggone mule” in “Save It for Me.”
In the regular structure of the poetic transformation of convention, [3] any association can be inverted, denied, or altered in a variety of other ways. For instance, whereas the two references just cited are positive, asserting the speaker’s qualifications as a partner, others are negative. Big Bill Broonzy in “Big Bill Blues” refuses to take orders from his beloved, saying, “cinch I ain’t going to be your mule,” and Sonny Boy Williamson indignantly objects, “You want Sonny Boy to be your mule.” (“Low Down Ways“). [4]
But the changes the poet can ring on the theme of the mule do not cease there. With a phrase very little different from those already cited, the physical power of the animal can also exemplify the singer’s sexual energy and endurance as in Will Weldon’s enthusiastic “Hitch Me to your Buggy and Drive Me Like a Mule.”
The mules may equally suggest the woman’s sexual energy as in Huddie Ledbetter’s “Honey, I’m All Out and Down” with its unmistakably erotic lines: “Wouldn't mind a jug : honey on the mule's behind/Yes a brownskin woman : make a preacher lay his Bible down.” In Texas Alexander’s “Levee Camp Moan Blues” the mule is simply decodable as a lover: “Lord I couldn't find a mule” and the virtues of a country girl are said to make her a “jewel brown mule” (Walter Vincon and the Mississippi Sheiks, “She Ain’t No Good”). Her mule-like power is praised by Ed Bell whose lover is “strong as a mule” in “She’s a Fool Gal.”
The mule’s connotations may, however, be negative for women as well as men. For instance, Blind Lemon Jefferson says his beloved was acting “just like a balky mule.” (“Balky Mule Blues“ ) and Willie Baker in “Mama, Don’t Rush Me Blues” says “Mama you been just like : says a farmer's mule/longer I live with you : harder you is to rule.” [5]
A good share of the references to women as mules employ the set formula familiar to all blues lovers in a long list of variations all including the phrase “left me a mule to ride.” [6] In each of these songs, the singer notes the departure of his lover, often on a train, leaving him only a mule to ride. Ride, of course, is a common euphemism for sexual intercourse, so the formula simply states the love-longing of the singer, though sometimes including such subtle variations as David King’s lament in his “Sweet Potato Blues” that “the mule laid down and died.”
The other most common set formula is one in which the mule is again male: the complaint that the lover has been two-timed, that there is “another mule kicking in my stall.” Here the mule is again masculine with the stall representing the feminine. Very often the formula is simple as in Tampa Red’s “It’s Tight Like That”: “Found another mule : kicking in my stall.” [7] Variations include Kokomo Arnold’s reversal in “Your Ways and Actions”: “my mule is kicking in your stall” and the inclusion of the phrase in the old song “Seven Drunken Nights” [8] by Coley Jones in his “Drunkard’s Special” which includes the lines “I went home drunk as I could be/There's another mule in the stable : where my mule ought to be.”
There remain a number of usages of mule imagery that fit none of the patterns I have described. Several singers refer to actual mules with no apparent other meaning. For instance, Robert Wilkins’ “New Stock Yard Blues” speaks of actual stockyards and livestock purchasing and Sleepy John Estes’ “Tell Me About It” complains about a rural boss insisting that sharecroppers share a mule. [9] The effects of hard liquor are associated with the kick of a mule by Kid Prince Moore in “Bug Juice Blues” and by Robert Hicks (Barbecue Bob) in “Blind Pig Blues.” Blind Lemon Jefferson in “Long Lonesome Blues” declares “Well the blues come to Texas : loping like a mule,” though he might as well have said a rabbit or a deer. The endless variety of other potential uses for mule imagery is suggested by the miscellany of lines I have not yet mentioned. [10]
The use of poetic conventions, such as the mule image in American blues, is, like all figures of speech, not a code in which one word is simply substituted for another. It is a complex system of association and connotation that generates an ever-widening semantic field. Both through the calculated imprecision of the correspondence between tenor and vehicle and the additional enrichment of meaning through allusion, image clusters and other figures distinguish poetic from non-aesthetic uses of language. They enable the writer to express precise shades of thought as well as inviting delight from the receptive consumer.
1. My database is the excellent “Michael Taft’s Pre=War Blues Lyrics Concordance” available at http://dylan61.se/michael%20taft,%20blues%20anthology.txt.WebConcordance/framconc.htm. I have appended a complete list of songs from his catalogue that mention mules. In my essay songs and artists are cited by name, making them simple to locate on the list, whereas in endnotes I use sometimes the titles and sometimes only the numbers assigned to each. In the few cases in which several versions of a song were released in the same year, the texts differ enough that the reader may have to check each to find the relevant material.
2. In fourteen songs the mule is identified with a man and in seventeen with a woman. References to men occur is 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 21, 24, 26, 30, 43, 44, and 47. Those to women are in 2, 4, 6, 8, 13, 20, 27, 28, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42, 48
3. For the general concept see my “Transformation of Convention” on this site. For specific applications in practical criticism, see, among other essays available here “Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang,” “The Early English Carol,” or “William IX.”
4. See also the similar complaint in Richard Rabbit Brown’s “James Alley Blues”: “she want to drive me like a mule.”
5. Similarly Roosevelt Sykes in “No Good Woman Blues” says, “I won't try no mule : that don't know gee from haw/I don't want no woman : she just soon as say yes as to say no”
6. The formula appears in 13, 20, 34, 39, and 48.
7. The formula appears also in 4, 11, 16, 18, 32, 33, 41, and 49.
8. “Seven Drunken Nights” is the usual Irish title. This popular, slightly ribald song is a variation of the Scottish one collected by Child “Our Goodman.” It is related as well to the English broadside "The Merry Cuckold and the Kind Wife."
9. In a similar vein Sleepy John Estes in “Working Man Blues” inveighs against automation, saying “white folks you ought to work/ More mules and men.”
10. For Blind Willie McTell a mule’s tail suggests public hair. (“Kind Mama”) In Blind Bogus Ben Covington’s “Boodle-Um-Bum Bum” “scared my mule away” refers to the singer’s dope selling being disturbed. For Peter Chatman (Memphis Slim) “son just don't lead a doggone mule” means to look out for number one. (“Me, Myself, and I”) In Big Bill Broonzy’s “Grandma’s Farm” “got a note my black mule died” means a change of lovers. Finally Charlie Bozo Nickerson’s line in “Move that Thing,” while obscure, is doubtless obscene: “The mules backed up : in my face.”
This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”
1. Texas Alexander “Awful Moaning Blues. Pt. 2” 1929
2. Texas Alexander “Levee Camp Moan Blues 1927 (two versions)
3. Kokomo Arnold “Front Door Blues” 1925
4. Kokomo Arnold “Front Door Blues” 1935
5. Kokomo Arnold “Your Ways and Actions” 1938
6. Willie Baker “Mama, Don’t Rush Me Blues” 1929
7. Barefoot Bill (Ed Bell) “From Now On” 1929
8. Ed Bell “She’s a Fool Gal” 1930
9. Blind Blake “Bootleg Rum Dum Blues” 1928
10. Blind Blake “Goodbye Mama Moan” 1928
11. Big Bill (Broonzy) “Big Bill Blues” 1932 (two versions)
12. Big Bill (Broonzy) “Grandma’s Farm” (two versions) 1920
13. Richard Rabbit Brown “James Alley Blues” 1927
14. Washboard Sam (Robert Clifford Brown) “Lowland Blues” 1937
15. Washboard Sam (Robert Clifford Brown) “Save It for Me” 1938
16. Charlie Campbell “Goin’ Away Blues” 1937
17. Peter Chatman (Memphis Slim) “Me, Myself, and I” 1941
18. Kid Cole “Niagara Fall Blues” 1928
19. Blind Bogus Ben Covington “Boodle-Um-Bum Bum” 1928
20. Walter Davis “Travelin’ this Lonesome Road” 1935
21. Memphis Minnie (Lizzie Douglas) “He’s in the Ring” 1935
22. Sleepy John Estes “Tell Me About It” 1940
23. Sleepy John Estes “Working Man Blues” 1941
24. Hound Head Henry “Low Down Hound Blues” 1928
25. Robert Hicks (Barbecue Bob) “Blind Pig Blues” 1928
26. Son House “My Black Mama, Part 1” 1930
27. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Balky Mule Blues“ 1929
28. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Lemon’s Worried Blues” 1928
29. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Long Lonesome Blues” 1926
30. Blind Lemon Jefferson “Rabbit Foot Blues” 1926
31. Coley Jones “Drunkard’s Special” 1929 (five recordings)
32. Maggie Jones “You May Go But You’ll Come Back Some Day” 1924
33. Stovepipe No. 1 (Sam Jones) “Bed Slats” 1927
34. David King “Sweet Potato Blues” 1930 (two versions)
35. Huddie Ledbetter “Honey, I’m All Out and Down” 1925
36. Blind Willie McTell “Kind Mama” 1929
37. Kid Prince Moore “Bug Juice Blues” 1936
38. Charlie Bozo Nickerson “Move that Thing” 1920
39. Bessie Smith “J.C. Holmes Blues” 1925
40. Roosevelt Sykes “No Good Woman Blues” 1930 (two versions)
41. Henry Thomas “Texas Easy Street Blues” 1928
42. Walter Vincon (Mississippi Sheiks) “She Ain’t No Good” 1930
43. Will Weldon (Casey Bill) “Hitch Me to your Buggy and Drive Me Like a Mule” 1927
44. Peetie Wheatstraw “When a Man Gets Down” 1936
45. Tampa Red (Hudson Whitaker) “It’s Tight Like That” 1928
46. Robert Wilkins “New Stock Yard Blues” 1935
47. Sonny Boy Williamson “Low Down Ways“ 1938
48. Sonny Boy Williamson “Shotgun Blues” 1941 (two versions)
49. Leola B. Wilson “Back-Biting Bee Blues” 1926
Notes on Recent Reading 31 [Marlowe, Trollope, p'Bitek]
The Jew of Malta (Marlowe)
The Jew of Malta is as full of plot turns as a Hitchcock film and consistently supported by Marlowe’s marvelous swinging pentameters. Its dark and cynical world is signaled by the initial appearance of the Senecan ghost of Machiavelli (called Machiavel, surely in part to sound like “make-evil”) who boasts in the prologue:
Admired I am of those that hate me most.
Though some speak openly against my books,
Yet they will read me and thereby attain
To Peter’s chair.
As Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 by Edward I, it is unlikely that many in Marlowe’s audience had ever seen one. Still, anti-Semitic stereotypes were sufficiently persistent that the play includes a reference to ritual murder of children and the title character is not only rapaciously greedy and amoral, but also has a large nose (apparently an artificial one for the stage). It seems likely that Marlowe, notoriously an unbeliever in an age when atheism or even heterodoxy could be most severely punished, was himself little concerned with the issue of Jewishness except as a sign of outsider status. There are several unnamed minor Jewish characters who do not seem monstrous; Ithamore, the Muslim slave, is fully as vicious as his Hebrew master, and the Christian Governor of Malta shrinks from no deceit in pursuit of his interests. When the two friars are competing for Barabas’ patronage, they fall to blows. Surely, then, the Jew is a Jew symbolically, employing conventions already centuries old, and the slur, if slur it be, is against humanity itself..
The Prime Minister (Trollope)
I have elsewhere discussed the slightly guilt-tinged pleasure I find in Trollope. The Prime Minister, for all its thousand pages, is little different from others. It possesses, indeed, boasts of, the same placid confidence in things as we find them and people as they are with the exception of a few unmanly scoundrels (and with gaze averted from the lower orders except for an occasional comic or pathetic turn). The faults of those who are not scoundrels derive always from weakness or simple-mindedness and are thus treated with considerable indulgence. This volume ends in a celebratory wedding and thus may claim the name of comedy, though a good deal of the sentimental is folded in along the way. Perhaps the clearest indicator of Trollope’s tone is the sort of names he tosses off, especially for lesser characters. In The Prime Minister himself plays a considerable role, for how could a Duke of Omnium do otherwise, and along the way the reader encounters such characters as Sir Orlando Drought, Lord Cantrip, Sir Timothy Beeswax, the Earl of Earlybird, Sir Damask Monogram, the Marquis of Mount Fidgett, Mr. Rattler, and Sir Omicron Pie.
Song of Lawino (Okot p’Bitek)
This poem, by the Ugandan Okot p’Bitek was originally written in the middle 1950s in metered and rhymed lines in the Luo language of the author’s Acholi people. Its free verse translation by the author a decade later was widely read, the first long African poem to enjoy global attention. The work shares with p’Bitek’s first novel, Lak Tar Miyo Kinyero Wi Lobo (1953, later translated into English as White Teeth) the theme of conflict between tradition and modernity, between African custom and European practice. The poem, subtitled “An African Lament,” details the grievances of a first wife whose husband has taken to Western tastes including a citified second wife. Using what the reader can only assume to be the literary devices of Luo poetry and employing some arresting figures of speech, the neglected wife praises the value of customary mores and calls her husband a dog of the whites, though ready to turn tp praising him as the son of a chief if he will only himself take pride in his African culture. The book’s success brought some knowledge of African practices to curious American and European readers. As in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the footnotes are conveniently edited into the story. The author deserves credit for trying to employ indigenous language in a work of modern literature, but the worthy experiment yielded a disappointing result. It is enough to see the woodcut illustrations by Frank Horley which look as though they belong is a child’s storybook.
Thomas Love Peacock and the End of Poetry
Thomas Love Peacock’s satiric essay “The Four Ages of Poetry” is far less well-known than the essay it inspired in response, Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry.” While the popular disparity is adequately explained by the second author’s far greater eminence, it is also true that Peacock’s ideas have little currency today while the exalted notions of the poet’s role set forth by Shelley remain widely accepted. The first appeal of the text to a contemporary reader is likely Peacock’s acerbic wit; he refers, for instance, to the Lake poets as an “egregious confraternity of rhymesters” and to Wordsworth in particular as “a morbid dreamer.” [1]
The essay like the conversations in Peacock’s entertaining romans à clef, can scarcely be taken at face value [2]. Indeed, one of the principles set forth in the essay is that poetry, which is to say, imaginative writing in general, is designed only to entertain and not to embody truth. Nonetheless, the radical objections Peacock makes are not peculiar to him or to his age, but rather are similar to points made by earlier critics. To cite only two examples, Plato condemned poetry in the Republic as an inadequate imitation of reality and as an exciter of unruly and uncontrollable passions that weakens rationality, and Bacon considered poetry to be merely “a dream of learning,” a sort of “feigned history” without a role in the advancement of knowledge. A response (reasoned, perhaps, as well as passionate) is therefore appropriate to the essay, though the critic of Peacock the critic will find himself seriously answering claims which to the writer may have been primarily facilitators of a most enviable wit.
Peacock maintains that poetry has value as entertainment only, lacking any capacity for expressing truth. Its prestige in the past was, he argues, due to the primitive state of more effective forms of investigation by the likes of “mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, historians, politicians, and political economists.” From a point of view shaped by eighteenth century rationalism, he likewise condemns the aesthetic emphasis on emotions and pleasure.
Unsympathetic as the contemporary reader may be to these conclusions, certain of Peacock’s points are compelling. The fact is that Peacock’s concluding claim that poetry’s downward slip is bound to continue, its weaknesses making Parnassus appear “far beneath” the eminence occupied by scientific, factual, and technological thinkers, might seem to have been substantially confirmed. No one could deny that poetry has been far further marginalized in the nearly two hundred years since the essay appeared in the Literary Miscellany. [3]
In addition, despite the limited information available in Peacock’s day about ancient (and modern oral) poetry, his survey of the history of poetry is in part consistent with more recent researches. The trajectory with which he predicts poetry’s diminished future arises from his accurate observation of its central role in earlier ages, though here his raillery begins to interfere with his facts. He notes that poets had been in archaic times “not only historians but theologians, moralists, and legislators” engaged in “delivering their oracles ex cathedra, and being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity.” His satiric vein intrudes to the detriment of his argument when he claims that the result of the poets’ “reputation of inspiration” is their “faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.” Though “the sole depositories of all the knowledge of their age,” their “knowledge is rather a crude congeries of traditional phantasies than a collection of useful truths.”
His selective view is apparent in his characterization of “iron age” poetry as wholly sycophantic, serving primarily “to disseminate the fame of [a chieftains’] achievements and the extent of his possessions.” He sounds very nearly like a vulgar Marxist before the time of Marx when he states categorically, “This is the origin of poetry, which, like all other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the commodity, and flourishes in proportion to the extent of the market.” According to Peacock this was a period of undisguised selfishness and raw power in which poets serve to gratify the egos of the strong, their business being “to disseminate the fame of [the local nobleman’s] achievements and the extent of his possessions.”
Here he mistakes the part for the whole more than promulgating outright error. Surely the professional role of the early poet -shaman-priest-legislator cannot be justifiably reduced to that of a pure mountebank, the epithet Peacock uses for poets. If the intellectual leadership of the species had been an utter humbug, the scientific progress Peacock admired could never have occurred. He writes in the same vein that primitive religion, apart from serving the vanity of rulers, was nothing but “ignorance and fear.” a more balanced view of the facts would recognize that oral poetry engages many themes other than praise of the ruling house, and that early religion embodies considerable subtle symbolic figuration of the order of the world having little to do with ruling class propaganda.
It is certainly true that one function of literature is to confirm received ideas, to reassure readers of what they have always thought was true. A portion of this reinforcement of socially accepted views is undoubtedly to confirm the nobility and excellence of the powers that be, and thus to encourage peace and social order. However, only a portion of art is conservative in this sense. Poetry may also cause its consumers to conceive new ideas, to question assumptions, and to perceive contradictions, ambiguities, and mysteries. Some works tend more toward the one end of this spectrum; some toward another, but in neglecting the critical potential of poetry, Peacock is guilty of distortion. (For him, this may be no error, but merely the set-up of a clever line. He notes that the bards of old times were always pleased to celebrate the strength of their lord, “being first duly inspired by that of his liquor.”)
In any event he considers poetry an inappropriate tool for investigating reality. Poets such as Wordsworth who “had retreated from the world for the express purpose of seeing nature as she was” instead can see only what “she was not,” “a sort of fairy- land which they peopled with mysticisms and chimaeras.” In his enlightened modern times, Peacock confidently declares, “with the progress of reason and civilization, facts become more interesting than fiction,” making poetry obsolete.
Apart from complaining that poetry cannot lead to truth, Peacock objects as well to its association with pleasure and emotion. To him the beauty of poetry’s melody is for the naïve and simple, “pleasant to the ears of uncultured men, who are easily caught by sound.” He dismisses the harmony of metrical patterns as nothing but “language on the rack of Procrustes.” The reader realizes that in Peacock’s semi-utilitarian view, all pleasure is necessarily trivial and child-like.
Similarly, to judge by this essay emotion for Peacock amounts to little more than “puling sentimentality.” He ridicules “sentiment, which is canting egotism in the mask of refined feeling; passion, which is the commotion of a weak and selfish mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; and sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head.” Far from praising the cultivated sensibility of the poet’s audience, he considers them vulgar, “that much larger portion of the reading public, whose minds are not awakened to the desire of valuable knowledge, and who are indifferent to any thing beyond being charmed, moved, excited, affected, and exalted.” They are nothing but “a multitude of listless idlers, yawning for amusement, and gaping for novelty.”
Overstated (and amusing) as this may be, it is misleading as well in this context. All organisms seek to pursue pleasure and avoid pain; the principle is fundamental to our species no less than to other animals. Further the world, even in modern times, is hardly as clear and simple as Peacock’s argument would imply. However clever our rationalizations may be, we are governed by emotion and by irrational motives, and we are beset by ambiguities, contradictions, and insoluble mysteries, especially when contemplating the chief concerns of our lives: love, death, and the divine. These are specifically the areas in which factual, “scientific” discourse fails, and poetic discourse excels. What Peacock repeatedly calls “chimaeras” is in fact the daily stuff of our consciousness.
Toward the end of his piece, almost like a punch line, Peacock says that, as so many excellent poems are already in existence, no more need be written. But this provocative claim is undercut by the fact that its author has seen fit to compose a highly literary essay using all the devices of rhetoric to present it. In very much the same manner as a lyric or a short story, Peacock is inviting his readers to imagine, “What if one were to say this . . .?” If the result is Bacon would call “feigned history” few would wish to substitute unimaginative prose, however transparent. The significant objects of contemplation are never emptied out by analysis; there is always a further word to be added. There is no end of poems and there is no end of essays.
1. The entire passage following is worthy of quotation.
“”While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age. Mr. Scott digs up the poachers and cattle-stealers of the ancient border. Lord Byron cruizes for thieves and pirates on the shores of the Morea and among the Greek Islands. Mr. Southey wades through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, strings them into an epic. Mr. Wordsworth picks up village legends from old women and sextons; and Mr. Coleridge, to the valuable information acquired from similar sources, superadds the dreams of crazy theologians and the mysticisms of German metaphysics, and favours the world with visions in verse, in which the quadruple elements of sexton, old woman, Jeremy Taylor, and Emanuel Kant, are harmonized into a delicious poetical compound. Mr. Moore presents us with a Persian, and Mr. Campbell with a Pennsylvanian tale, both formed on the same principle as Mr. Southey's epics, by extracting from a perfunctory and desultory perusal of a collection of voyages and travels, all that useful investigation would not seek for and that common sense would reject.”
2. Shelley wrote to Peacock on March 21, 1821, calling his own essay “an antidote” to Peacock’s, but minimizing their differences, saying “ You will see that I have taken a more general view of what poetry is than you have, and will perhaps agree with several of my positions, without considering your own touched.” It has been suggested, for instance by P. M. Yarker in the introduction to the Everyman edition of Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, that Peacock conceived the “Four Ages” intentionally playing straight man to Shelley’s vatic poet.
3. In this twenty-first century, it seems that any politician’s appeal for support for schools must insist that education is centered in what is today called the STEM curriculum. Not poetry alone, but the very ideal of a liberal education has withered.
Peacock maintains that poetry has value as entertainment only, lacking any capacity for expressing truth. Its prestige in the past was, he argues, due to the primitive state of more effective forms of investigation by the likes of “mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, historians, politicians, and political economists.” From a point of view shaped by eighteenth century rationalism, he likewise condemns the aesthetic emphasis on emotions and pleasure.
Unsympathetic as the contemporary reader may be to these conclusions, certain of Peacock’s points are compelling. The fact is that Peacock’s concluding claim that poetry’s downward slip is bound to continue, its weaknesses making Parnassus appear “far beneath” the eminence occupied by scientific, factual, and technological thinkers, might seem to have been substantially confirmed. No one could deny that poetry has been far further marginalized in the nearly two hundred years since the essay appeared in the Literary Miscellany. [3]
In addition, despite the limited information available in Peacock’s day about ancient (and modern oral) poetry, his survey of the history of poetry is in part consistent with more recent researches. The trajectory with which he predicts poetry’s diminished future arises from his accurate observation of its central role in earlier ages, though here his raillery begins to interfere with his facts. He notes that poets had been in archaic times “not only historians but theologians, moralists, and legislators” engaged in “delivering their oracles ex cathedra, and being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity.” His satiric vein intrudes to the detriment of his argument when he claims that the result of the poets’ “reputation of inspiration” is their “faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.” Though “the sole depositories of all the knowledge of their age,” their “knowledge is rather a crude congeries of traditional phantasies than a collection of useful truths.”
His selective view is apparent in his characterization of “iron age” poetry as wholly sycophantic, serving primarily “to disseminate the fame of [a chieftains’] achievements and the extent of his possessions.” He sounds very nearly like a vulgar Marxist before the time of Marx when he states categorically, “This is the origin of poetry, which, like all other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the commodity, and flourishes in proportion to the extent of the market.” According to Peacock this was a period of undisguised selfishness and raw power in which poets serve to gratify the egos of the strong, their business being “to disseminate the fame of [the local nobleman’s] achievements and the extent of his possessions.”
Here he mistakes the part for the whole more than promulgating outright error. Surely the professional role of the early poet -shaman-priest-legislator cannot be justifiably reduced to that of a pure mountebank, the epithet Peacock uses for poets. If the intellectual leadership of the species had been an utter humbug, the scientific progress Peacock admired could never have occurred. He writes in the same vein that primitive religion, apart from serving the vanity of rulers, was nothing but “ignorance and fear.” a more balanced view of the facts would recognize that oral poetry engages many themes other than praise of the ruling house, and that early religion embodies considerable subtle symbolic figuration of the order of the world having little to do with ruling class propaganda.
It is certainly true that one function of literature is to confirm received ideas, to reassure readers of what they have always thought was true. A portion of this reinforcement of socially accepted views is undoubtedly to confirm the nobility and excellence of the powers that be, and thus to encourage peace and social order. However, only a portion of art is conservative in this sense. Poetry may also cause its consumers to conceive new ideas, to question assumptions, and to perceive contradictions, ambiguities, and mysteries. Some works tend more toward the one end of this spectrum; some toward another, but in neglecting the critical potential of poetry, Peacock is guilty of distortion. (For him, this may be no error, but merely the set-up of a clever line. He notes that the bards of old times were always pleased to celebrate the strength of their lord, “being first duly inspired by that of his liquor.”)
In any event he considers poetry an inappropriate tool for investigating reality. Poets such as Wordsworth who “had retreated from the world for the express purpose of seeing nature as she was” instead can see only what “she was not,” “a sort of fairy- land which they peopled with mysticisms and chimaeras.” In his enlightened modern times, Peacock confidently declares, “with the progress of reason and civilization, facts become more interesting than fiction,” making poetry obsolete.
Apart from complaining that poetry cannot lead to truth, Peacock objects as well to its association with pleasure and emotion. To him the beauty of poetry’s melody is for the naïve and simple, “pleasant to the ears of uncultured men, who are easily caught by sound.” He dismisses the harmony of metrical patterns as nothing but “language on the rack of Procrustes.” The reader realizes that in Peacock’s semi-utilitarian view, all pleasure is necessarily trivial and child-like.
Similarly, to judge by this essay emotion for Peacock amounts to little more than “puling sentimentality.” He ridicules “sentiment, which is canting egotism in the mask of refined feeling; passion, which is the commotion of a weak and selfish mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; and sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head.” Far from praising the cultivated sensibility of the poet’s audience, he considers them vulgar, “that much larger portion of the reading public, whose minds are not awakened to the desire of valuable knowledge, and who are indifferent to any thing beyond being charmed, moved, excited, affected, and exalted.” They are nothing but “a multitude of listless idlers, yawning for amusement, and gaping for novelty.”
Overstated (and amusing) as this may be, it is misleading as well in this context. All organisms seek to pursue pleasure and avoid pain; the principle is fundamental to our species no less than to other animals. Further the world, even in modern times, is hardly as clear and simple as Peacock’s argument would imply. However clever our rationalizations may be, we are governed by emotion and by irrational motives, and we are beset by ambiguities, contradictions, and insoluble mysteries, especially when contemplating the chief concerns of our lives: love, death, and the divine. These are specifically the areas in which factual, “scientific” discourse fails, and poetic discourse excels. What Peacock repeatedly calls “chimaeras” is in fact the daily stuff of our consciousness.
Toward the end of his piece, almost like a punch line, Peacock says that, as so many excellent poems are already in existence, no more need be written. But this provocative claim is undercut by the fact that its author has seen fit to compose a highly literary essay using all the devices of rhetoric to present it. In very much the same manner as a lyric or a short story, Peacock is inviting his readers to imagine, “What if one were to say this . . .?” If the result is Bacon would call “feigned history” few would wish to substitute unimaginative prose, however transparent. The significant objects of contemplation are never emptied out by analysis; there is always a further word to be added. There is no end of poems and there is no end of essays.
1. The entire passage following is worthy of quotation.
“”While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age. Mr. Scott digs up the poachers and cattle-stealers of the ancient border. Lord Byron cruizes for thieves and pirates on the shores of the Morea and among the Greek Islands. Mr. Southey wades through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, strings them into an epic. Mr. Wordsworth picks up village legends from old women and sextons; and Mr. Coleridge, to the valuable information acquired from similar sources, superadds the dreams of crazy theologians and the mysticisms of German metaphysics, and favours the world with visions in verse, in which the quadruple elements of sexton, old woman, Jeremy Taylor, and Emanuel Kant, are harmonized into a delicious poetical compound. Mr. Moore presents us with a Persian, and Mr. Campbell with a Pennsylvanian tale, both formed on the same principle as Mr. Southey's epics, by extracting from a perfunctory and desultory perusal of a collection of voyages and travels, all that useful investigation would not seek for and that common sense would reject.”
2. Shelley wrote to Peacock on March 21, 1821, calling his own essay “an antidote” to Peacock’s, but minimizing their differences, saying “ You will see that I have taken a more general view of what poetry is than you have, and will perhaps agree with several of my positions, without considering your own touched.” It has been suggested, for instance by P. M. Yarker in the introduction to the Everyman edition of Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, that Peacock conceived the “Four Ages” intentionally playing straight man to Shelley’s vatic poet.
3. In this twenty-first century, it seems that any politician’s appeal for support for schools must insist that education is centered in what is today called the STEM curriculum. Not poetry alone, but the very ideal of a liberal education has withered.
Saturday, July 1, 2017
Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life”
Numbers in parentheses refer to the translation of Baudelaire’s essay readily available at http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Baudelaire_Painter-of-Modern-Life_1863.pdf. The French text may be read at https://www.uni-due.de/lyriktheorie/texte/1863_baudelaire.html among other sites. Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.
In “The Painter of Modern Life” Baudelaire managed to define the character of the art of his own time with sufficient acumen and aptness that much of what he said remains useful today, a century and a half later. Indeed, to many literary historians Baudelaire is the first modern poet. In his own time, Verlaine declared that he represents “puissament et essentiellement l’homme modern” [1], and this opinion has since become a commonplace. [2] Baudelaire’s exemplary painter (called in the essay M.G. but since identified as Constantin Guys) is described as self-taught, transcending earlier aesthetic standards. The artist’s peculiarly modern excellence is a result of his radical rebellion and his absorption in the modern scene, his fascination with the tumult and confusion of mass life in the present urban-centered era, redefining what has become of “the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction,” in Benjamin’s phrase. In many ways Baudelaire’s vision was prescient, extending the trajectory of artistic Bohemia beyond his own day and anticipating twentieth century concepts of hip, while in certain respects, in particular the willful facelessness of Monsieur M.G., Baudelaire’s judgement seems wide of the mark.
Going far beyond those who contributed to the Salon des Réfusés, Baudelaire chooses to champion a self-taught artist (2) who worked primarily as an illustrator and cartoonist. This choice implicitly overturns not merely the specific taste represented by the Académie des Beaux-Arts’ Salon de Paris, the most prestigious French exhibit since the middle of the eighteenth century, which Manet and the impressionists were challenging. Baudelaire’s more far-reaching critique questions fundamental aesthetic values, thus anticipating the rhetoric of the twentieth century Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists.
Indulging his taste for provocation, Baudelaire praises M.G. for not being an artist but rather a “man of the world” (“homme du monde”). He asserts that most artists are “very skilled brutes, mere manual laborers, village pub-talkers with the minds of country bumpkins.” This conventional type is “tied to his palette like a serf to the soil.” On the other hand with a bias toward the irrational that has been familiar since the Romantic era M.G.’s integrity is implied when he is said to paint like a barbarian, a child, a drunk, or a convalescent. (1,3) [3]
This posture echoes the poet’s rebellious impulse to overturn values. The very title of his principal work Les Fleurs du Mal arises from a perverse wish to celebrate what the world condemns. [4] Often he does not trouble to provide justification, relying instead on the strength of his vituperation to stimulate a corrective review of values rather than straightforwardly making a case for alternatives. Who, indeed, would actually celebrate evil? What Parisian would feel only “spleen” while strolling the streets of the capital? Baudelaire’s fascination with lesbianism likewise signals more an attempt, successful as it happened, to be outré than a fetish of his own. Just as much supposed diabolism (in outlaw biker and heavy metal imagery, for instance) is not so much devil-worship as baiting the pious, Baudelaire seeks a rhetorical, not a logical, effect in his selection of the outstanding modern artist.
The man of the world exemplified by his chosen artist is a “spiritual citizen of the universe” “who understands the world and the mysterious and legitimate reasons behind all its customs.” (2) How does he gain such hermetic wisdom? Baudelaire defines two types of privileged observers: the dandy and the flâneur.
Both represent observers who are at the same time detached and wholly absorbed in the urban scene. The dandy expresses in what would today be called lifestyle choice “the aristocratic superiority of his mind.” Never “a vulgar man,” he “comes close to spirituality and to stoicism.” His personal cultivation of beauty, a “form of Romanticism,” implicitly reproaches the bourgeoisie. (10) The pose of the aesthete, the apostle of beauty, of course, flourished with the aid of Pater in Wilde and Whistler and then in Saki and Ronald Firbank. The dandy remained recognizable in the crowds at San Francisco’s Fillmore, done up in beads and crystals and feathers, gowns and robes and unlikely thrift store ensembles. Whether or not Baudelaire was correct in claiming that “dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages,” representing ‘what is best in human pride,” it is quite certain that it represents “opposition and revolt.” (11)
Yet M.G.is not exactly a dandy. Though Baudelaire says he “would have a sheaf of good reasons for the word ‘dandy’ implies a quintessence of character and a subtle under-standing of all the moral mechanisms of this worlds,” he resists using the label. While “the dandy aspires to cold detachment,” his artist friend is a passionate lover of life with even an “excessive love of visible, tangible things.” (4)
"Thus the lover of universal life moves into the crowd as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity. He, the lover of life, may also be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd: to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every one of its movements presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all the elements that go to compose life. It is an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting.” (4)
This characterization becomes very nearly a definition of art in general for surely the “multiplicity” and “flowing grace,” of lived experience, even its “inconstant and fleeting” nature are not unique to modernity.
The distinction between dandy and flâneur is elucidated by Baudelaire’s use of Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd.” The narrator who had been idly observing the scene in the street in just the sort of receptive mood Baudelaire had praised as typical of the man of the world, “in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui—moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs.” Enjoying this heightened consciousness he observes various easily categorized and understood types when he notices an old man and is struck by “the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression.” Motivated to pursue this enigmatic figure in an attempt to discover his secrets, he concludes after trailing him for an entire day and night, what he had suspected from the outset. He declares, without the slightest evidence, that the old man "is the type and the genius of deep crime.” Thus it is a mercy that he remains inscrutable: "es lasst sich nicht lesen.”
The story’s narrator, then, resembles M.G. in his fascinated attachment to the outside world, while the man he is shadowing remains like the dandy, altogether beyond reach, detached, unreadable. Only the former can provide us, the readers, with a story, but the latter is similarly extraordinary, the first distinguished from the masses by his perceptive sensibility and the latter by his entire involvement in a mysterious but demanding game of engagement. One feels the “man of the crowd” sees through the charades of social life and, rather than withdrawing in reaction, submerges himself entirely in a principled but pointless act of performance art.
The notion of the anonymity of the modern city in which everyone a “a man of the crowd” doubtless influenced Baudelaire in his most striking false prediction. He maintains that M.G. who is, after all, a journalist who typically does not own his work but sells it to a publisher who may or may not even credit him, embraces this obscurity. The reader is told that he “carries his originality to the point of modesty,” that he does not even sign his drawings. Baudelaire’s modern ideal is to “be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world.” (4) Absorbed in the crowd, wholly participating in the mass experience “the observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.” (4)
Many phenomena of art since his time vindicate elements of Baudelaire’s idea of the modern. Dadaists, Surrealists, and others have reinforced his displacement of earlier ideas of beauty. Modern works tend to pervasive fragmentation (evident, for instance, in collage and in such poetic epics as Paterson and the Cantos). The investment of moderns in ephemera, in conceptual and performance works is entirely consistent with Baudelaire’s definition of the modern as foregrounding “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.” The absorption of the artist in mass culture is evident in Pop Art, street art, and the crossovers into advertising by such figures as Man Ray and Andy Warhol. Indeed, in modern American culture such commercial works as Breaking Bad are often accepted as art even by highly educated people.
If modern artists have more typically sought fame than emulating M. G.’s “modesty,” traces, perhaps of a contrary tendency may be seen in Pessoa’s concealment behind personae, Warhol’s dictum that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes,” [6] some street and guerilla artists, the Diggers’ Communications Company and the Atelier Populaire in 1968 Paris.
With the end of the old system of patronage, artists were thrown into the marketplace, while, at the same time, their alienation and rebellion led them to resent the bourgeoisie which had become their likeliest customer base. The replacement of the old dichotomy of courtly and popular art was supplanted by a shrinking field of “fine art” and an expanding one of mass commodified art. Baudelaire’s response to the dilemma of the artist in the modern world defined trends which have remained influential to the present day.
1. Verlaine, Œuvres posthumes, p. 8.
2. Among the more influential statements of this idea are in Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and Harold Rosenberg’s The Tradition of the New.
3. Other maneuvers meant to evade the conscious mind have included chance operations and outsider art.
4. Baudelaire’s wish to épater la bourgeoisie succeeded so well that the book could not be printed in its entirety in France until 1949.
5. Trailing after people on the street has been packaged as a work of art by numerous artists. The best-known version is doubtless Vito Acconci’s Following Piece.
6. On the screen of a television set by Banksy is written "In the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes,"
How I Came to Work at Scott, Foresman
Teaching Greek tragedy, I sometimes sought to explain fate neither as providence nor predestination, but simply as what one does not know until it unfolds in experience. I asked students to think of how their lives were dependent on chance, not merely their own paths, but even their existence. Had their parents not chanced to meet, through countless events, fortuitous in the sense of leading to their births, they would not be sitting in my classroom. Then I suggested they reflect on the same improbability extending back through grandparents and all the previous generations. In this light each individual’s substantial and indubitable existence was at the same time almost impossibly unlikely and altogether ordinary.
I recall one of John Cage's anecdotes about a woman – I cannot chase it down just now since my copies of Silence and A Year from Monday have vanished from my shelves – o every book less is regretted one day! Cage tells of a woman who had spent her entire adult life in a small New England town. When asked what had brought her there, she said that she had bought a bus ticket when young to the furthest destination she could afford. She never left. Itself implausible, the story is a charming fable of randomness in human life that makes sense to me. In my own life chance has pushed forward quite shamelessly.
During the late sixties, after my university graduation and marriage, the draft was still pursuing me. While the more level-headed among my contemporaries may have pursued professional credentials or begun saving for a down payment, I had dreams of poetry and travel. (Persistent for dreams, these have never left me.) Lacking altogether the career direction that seems to possess most of today’s youth, I realized with some regret that I had to find a job. My hostility to capitalism made most salaried positions distasteful. I would have felt a fraud in any corporate setting, regardless of my productivity. It is often inconvenient to possess values.
My antipathy toward “straight” jobs had, however, a corresponding benefit. Because of the fact that I greeted a host of options with a single reaction (can I carry off the imposture?), I found them all equally acceptable (and equally unacceptable), creating a wide range of choice.
Many of my former classmates stepped into positions open in those days to anyone with a liberal arts degree such as teaching in the Chicago schools or working for the welfare (as it was called). At that time a B.A. was also the ordinary qualification for executive trainee tracks in the business world, so it seemed as though, if Selective Service would just leave me alone, I could certainly find something.
Responding to the random prompts of classified advertisements, I applied all over the place in Chicago: an insurance company or two, a bank, even the Pinkerton agency. I was found to be unqualified as a night watchman by the last, but the bank gave me a job offer contingent only, they said, on my security background check. After a few days they must have heard something, because the offer was withdrawn.
Eventually I found my way to a little one-room employment agency, high in an old Loop office building, the kind with mail chutes next to the elevators in which one could occasionally see letters flash by on their speedy trip from higher floors. This one man operation specialized in placing applicants as writers and editors. The agent’s commission, though steep (more than a month of the worker’s salary) was, in those olden days, paid entirely by the hiring company. The proprietor of the agency sat at a capacious pre-computer desk heaped with papers, one of which occasionally fluttered to the floor as he chewed an unlit cigar and talked. It was the sort of enterprise, I realized, that survived solely on account of this single individual’s contacts and their faith in his judgement. After he had sized me up, he said, “Well, I think I’ve got two good spots for you, one at least, maybe two. Are you willing to write pornography?”
Thinking myself ready for most anything other than manual labor and thinking, perhaps, of Henry Miller and Anais Nin, I assented and, a day or two later, headed out to the west side for an interview at a small company that published three tabloid papers a few notches below the Enquirer and the Star as well as four or five skin magazines (as the pre-pornography genre was known). The production area for the tabloid was a single large room with long tables, more like a lunchroom than an editorial office, with a few glassed-in areas for the head editors. I learned at my interview that my language skills had impressed them. They thought I could scan the heap of equally lurid European tabloids to which they subscribed in search of articles to translate. They were unconcerned about obtaining rights. “Oh, they’re probably stealing from us. That’s the least of our concerns.” I would have the opportunity not only to translate, but to use my own creative powers as well. I got a short course in making stories up from nothing. “For instance, we might run a story with a headline, ‘President Nixon’s Wife Seeks Divorce’ and then quote some unnamed ‘experts’ about potential tell-tale signs. It’s simple to say very nearly anything you like without any problems. Then we could find pictures of each of them scowling and place them together so it looks like they are reacting to each other.”
I did a bit of writing as a sample and had lunch with the staff where I was not surprised to find some interesting people, a number of travelers, artists, poets, and at least one undergoing a novel. I figured I could live with this bunch. The next day I got an offer and asked for a few days to consider.
The following day was the second interview the employment agent had lined up, this one with the textbook company Scott Foresman, famous then for its Dick, Jane, and Sally readers, though it published a wide range of other books, including college texts, and Thorndike-Barnhart dictionaries. This looked very much like a “straight” job. The offices were in a modern building with vast lawns in suburban Glenview, everyone wore suits, and I felt like I had to act a part to make the right impression. To be quite certain I could do that, I took some benzedrines before driving out for my interview. Here, too, my supposed language skills were the excuse for my being considered to work on a series of world literature books aimed at high school honors English classes. That head editor rapidly decided I wouldn’t fit their needs, but I had talked in such a scintillating manner that she referred me to a colleague who was directing the development of a four-year series of books aimed at “inner city” (meaning minority-dominated) schools.
I was to learn that Scott Foresman’s dedication to racial equality was influenced primarily by market forces. Mindful of the civil rights movement but also of Southern states, not a few of which had state-wide text adoption, the publisher had a number of versions of Dick, Jane, and Sally. One was immaculately white, another included darker faces in non-speaking roles, and a third had African-American characters who actually interacted with the angelic suburban stars. There did not seem to be an all-black edition, which must have been an oversight, as all-black schools certainly did (and do) exist. However, the burning cities of the mid-sixties summer riots had unnerved the powers that be enough to call for the War on Poverty and special funding for urban, under-performing, disadvantaged, education. So the corporations responded, and the project for which I was being considered was a result.
Little remains to tell. Perhaps because my recent experience as a VISTA volunteer attested to my suburbanite’s understanding of the underclass, I got an offer from Scott Foresman to be an editorial assistant. I considered. While I felt at home in the demi-mondaine atmosphere of the first option – it would have likely made a more entertaining story -- I possessed just enough prudence to realize that the second would look better on a resumé. So I accepted and spent a few years in a pleasant window office there (though more often hiding out in the carrel at the back of the library), living on very little on Chicago’s far North Side, amassing money to see the world. I learned that among the workers were no less a percentage of artistic, even hip, people than at the disreputable publisher: poets, artists, scholars, some real characters. I found that that to be a high school textbook editor was tantamount to being a high school textbook author. The concept for the series was attributed to a teacher but every word in the finished project, the selection of the readings, the teacher’s manual and other apparatus were all composed entirely in-house. I was told, “There has to be a working teacher as author. He can go and do publicity at professional meetings, but he doesn’t have time to actually write the thing.”
The pace was very comfortable. At least three hours out of four were my own. After a while I joined a simpatico carpool, most of the members of which went immediately to the subsidized cafeteria when we arrived to linger over coffee and pastries before even reporting to their areas. The director of another project hired a new editor, fresh from a spell at the Lama Commune where he had departed after the group failed to accept his suggestion that everyone act out the previous night’s dreams every morning. The fact was that his services were not really needed for six months. I came to understand this lassitude about our productivity when I saw a pie chart of the expenses of publication in which our work was almost unnoticeable among the costs of advertising, salesmen’s commissions, and the actual printing.
When I had to participate in large meetings with marketing staff or potential customers, my boss’s boss, vice-president of editorial services, sometimes made semi-embarrassed but good-humored references to my long hair or my Western boots, but I was never told to conform. I could perhaps have become too comfortable there.
As the time for my departure, known to me but not to them, approached, this v.p. began hinting that there was “something sweet” in store for me shortly. Realizing after sufficient clues that he meant a promotion I kept silent about leaving, thinking that to report a higher title would be advantageous in the future. I don‘t even recall if I made it to the position of “assistant editor,” but I am quite certain it would never have made any subsequent difference if I had.
Remarks on the Grassroots Poetry Scene
Dana Gioia’s celebrated essay “Can Poetry Matter?” hit the mark squarely. The problems he outlined for the form which had historically been considered the most prestigious of arts have only intensified in the quarter century since the essay appeared. [1] Now as then the greatest sign of poetry’s pathology is simply the ease with which people can ignore it altogether. Indeed the N.E.A.’s 2008 report found that the percentage of people who had read any poetry at all during the previous year had dropped to eight, less than half what it had been in 1992, shortly after Gioia’s essay. People who are not familiar with poetry are as a result incompetent to read poems even if they should make the attempt. So the malaise of the art is bad and getting worse.
Gioia laments this loss of poetry’s social role and the diminution of its readership. Folk song remained vigorous among the poor until the advent of mass media. Among bourgeois Victorian families the reading of poetry was a common domestic amusement, and into the twentieth century verse, albeit often patriotic, religious, or sentimental, appeared commonly in general circulation magazines, even in newspapers. The loss of a shared culture may be measured by the fact that a few generations ago Edmund Wilson could publish, in a non-academic journal, an excellent essay contrasting the virtues of Pope and Tennyson. Even in the 1950s remnants of this audience survived in the readers of journals such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and the Saturday Review. Gioia is quite right that these educated and curious non-specialist readers have all but disappeared. [2]
He describes poetry is an art without a following, “almost invisible,” in spite of the fact that new books, journals devoted to new poetry, readings, and – most dramatically, perhaps -- M.F.A. programs have proliferated. Doubtless due to his own vantage point at U.S.C., he emphasizes the university nexus as the mechanism that keeps poetry going on life support. His assertion that the home of poetry has moved “from Bohemia to bureaucracy” (by which he means university writing programs) overlooks the huge grassroots poetry scene based in coffee houses, bars, and churches. Yet many of his criticisms are equally valid for the non-academic poetry community which lacks only the sometimes decent salaries offered writers by educational institutions. Having spent my own life in part in academia and in part in the counter-culture, I can appreciate his comments on the creative writing industry, and I feel qualified to add as well some observations on the grassroots poetry scene.
I must, of course, as Gioia did, acknowledge the limitations of these strictures. A number of the poets I hear in my area are skillful, talented, and passionate. Many others at least avoid the gaucheries I here condemn. Like Gioia my concern is not the criticism of individuals but rather the diagnosis of the state of the field. I agree, as well, that those who love poetry can only applaud the proliferation of readings in recent decades. In my region there are events nearly every day – certainly a far more active scene than any other art enjoys, yet some aspects of these community readings trouble me.
I speak here of events in cafes, bars, and churches, not at universities or such major sanctioned cultural institutions as the 92nd Street Y, Poet’s House, or St. Mark’s. While it is certainly striking that so many people consider themselves practicing poets, one sometimes wishes that their number were fewer. For years critics have observed that more people write poetry than read it, and this fact leads to a great deal of half-baked word-stringing presented as poetry. Yet people in the scene are, for good reasons unrelated to art (and in stark contrast to the rivalries so evident in academic and big publishing circles), mutually supportive; one rarely hears a word of criticism. Even reviews of small press books and very often of those from major publishers as well, are generally written by friends wishing to do a favor for friends. I have been guilty of this myself more than once and on other occasions I have been cautioned by an editor to make no negative comment. In this way marketing has displaced criticism. As Gioia said, art requires standards.
The present audience for poetry, Gioia states accurately, “usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.” In a college setting one might add those whose profession is not composing literature but rather literary criticism, but in local readings it is very nearly absolutely true. He notes that the few essays and reviews of new poetry are overwhelmingly positive. “If,” he continues, a literary journal “publishes an interview, the tone will be unabashedly reverent toward the author. For these journals critical prose exists not to provide a disinterested perspective on new books but to publicize them.” This willful critical blindness is even more endemic in the local scene. If even national reviews and professors at prestigious institutions have abandoned “the hard work of evaluation,” this is even more the case among the micro-coteries that support non-academic readings. The accepting and supportive atmosphere at community-based readings may sound big-hearted, but it leads to careless and ill-considered art.
The ritual ratification of the abdication of value judgment is the common polite applause following every poem. [3] Though a reading resembles in part a concert in which, it is true, convention requires applause after every piece, it is also like a talk or lecture at which reactions are deferred for the most part until the conclusion.
One revealing feature of grassroots readings is the consistent inclusion of an open reading following the featured poet. The natural reason for the open reading is to bolster attendance. People are so fond of their moments strutting on stage that they attend for that reason alone with little interest in others’ work. Too often one can observe audience members apparently considering what to read, shuffling thoughtfully through a sheaf of pages while someone else is at the podium. (Unaccountably, these same people often find they must do a good deal of page-shuffling even when their turn arrives to take the stage.) Beauty must be perceived to be realized; the more people focus on themselves alone, the less art has a chance.
Producers, I fear, have a similar motive in scheduling two, three, or even more readers at once. With multiple featured readers each of whom brings friends, the audience swells. To my mind a reading is at best an opportunity to define the work of an individual through hearing a broad enough sample to see what is going on in that person’s work and to form a reasonable judgement. (Of course, there are exceptions such as collaborative work or themed readings.) One does not ordinarily go to hear three different musicians each perform briefly, or to see a triple feature of films.
Whatever one may think of “academic” poetry, and I have been a lifelong heir to the anti-academic tradition descending from Pound through Rexroth to Bly and Blackburn, it provided some peer-reviewed standards. With digital printing technology easily available to all, anyone may print books and journals at will whether they have an audience or not. The old, admittedly unfair system of prestige based on publications has been supplanted by no system at all.
I suppose I here violate, however mildly, he unspoken social code to say nothing negative. The fact is that the relations among poets are ephemeral and of little real interest to others. What matters is the work. And to me today’s poetry at the grassroots shows symptoms of malaise.
The most obvious one to me is the utter lack of melody in much of what is called poetry today. From the origins of the art, poets have created beautiful pattern of sound, using many devices including rhyme, syllable-counting, stress accent, pitch, alliteration, assonance, and the like, yet today there is often little in sound to distinguish “poetry” from prose. I still have poetry notebooks from my middle and high school years. While they may not be worthy of anyone’s perusal today, they are not filled with Angst or callow rebellion or self-dramatization or other faults typical of many people’s teen-aged years. The most common element is experimentation with form: passages in iambs, trochees, anapests, dactyls and imitations of set forms of the past. (The second noticeable element is single words I found intriguing.) The best free verse is always cadenced and rhythmic, though often in unpredictable irregular ways.
Further, the poetry of amateurs, apart from those few who identify with the historic avant-garde, is built largely of self-expression. As Gioia notes, the one-time range of poetry “which had previously been a popular medium for narrative, satire, drama, even history and scientific speculation--retreated into lyric.” Since the Romantic era, lyric means primarily the expression of solipsistic emotion. Though one’s own experiences and obsessions form inevitably an element of one’s writing, all art requires a recognition of the distancing that must occur when the actions of one’s flashing neurons is set down in black and white on a page or in ringing syllables stirring the air. The creation of something beautiful may happen rapidly for a master who has long apprenticed, but the psychic material never succeeds if unprocessed. Whenever I hear someone say that he began writing after a grave illness or the loss of a lover, I expect the worst and I am unfortunately rarely wrong. Self-expression, of course, plays a role, but it is most effective when balanced with considerations of the aesthetic values embodied in the objet d’art itself as well as calculated considerations of the work’s effect on the reader.
Were I to devise circles of hell for would-be poets, I would place among the most egregious offenders writers who expect volume to compensate for slipshod writing. There is a place for declamatory rhetoric, but when a reader announces that he will present a “rant,” I regret having left my ear-plugs at home.
I will here graciously pass over the lesser sins such as lengthy shuffling of papers at the podium or supposedly jocular self-denigration typified by those who say such things as, “I will only torture you with two more . . . no, three.” Another sin, venial if not carried to extreme, is going on too long. No reading, even by a celebrated writer, should, I think, last longer than about forty-five minutes. The acutely open ears required for appreciating live poetry become fatigued by that time. In my own practice, I would much prefer to leave people wishing for one more piece rather than reacting to sensibility overload from one too many.
I feel oddly disarmed at the close of this exposition by the fact that, unlike the more optimistic Gioia, I have no proposals to remedy the situation. While first-rate poetry might be composed at any time, to thrive the art requires a competent readership. At the present all signs seem to point in the opposite direction.
1. The essay, later the first piece in a book of the same title, was first published in The Atlantic, May 1991 and is available at http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/gioia/gioia.htm. I say nothing here of Gioia’s own work or of his larger social roles first as a marketer of Jello and later of the NEA.
2. American higher education has played a pernicious role in this decline by replacing the ideals of a liberal arts education with vocational training. Though the proper role of universities is the production of new knowledge and, incidentally, the transmission of culture and the general intellectual training of the young, these goals have virtually vanished, overrun by our culture’s principal value, making money.
3. A similar phenomenon in community classical music concerts is the practice, in my area at least, of concluding every performance with a standing ovation. What, then, can the listener do to express an extraordinary reaction?
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