My Hats

  (and several others)

 

     Hats can define a person’s role.  A crown is the sign of a king; a toque means a chef, a mortarboard a graduate; a montera a bullfighter; a kippah a Jew; while a pointy hat might be either a dunce or a wizard.  Many hats suggest nationality: woolen baglike barretinas indicate a Catalan, a skotthúfa or tail-cap an Icelander, and the tall, semi-transparent gat made of horsehair and bamboo a Korean.  Some suggest narratives.  At once time observers of the Soviet government noticed that Politburo members were more likely than others to appear in public ceremonies wearing the fur hat or karakul.  American publicity  about this trend created a small vogue for such hats among American business executives. 

     The so-called whoopee cap has a more complex history.  Once boys would often remodel men’s discarded felt hats by cutting the brims in a zig-zag pattern and turning them up, often then adding a personal choice of ornaments such as pins, political or advertising buttons, or bottle caps.   Classic whoopees are worn by several of the Dead End Kids in films of the ‘thirties.  Long past the time that boys really refashioned their elders’ outworn hats, the whoopee cap lived on, particularly in cartoons.  In Little Lulu, the boys are differentiated through hat style.  Tubby generally appears in a little white “Dixie Cup” sailor cap, while Willy is in a flat cloth cap, and Eddie wears a whoopee cap.  

     Surely the longest run for a whoopee wearer, though, is Archie’s friend Jughead who has worn such a cap since his first appearance in Pep Comics #22 in 1941.  The cap became yet more appropriate for Jughead’s character when it became obsolete even for children, implying that Jughead was a non-conformist willing to flout expected teen fashion standards.

     Something of a Jughead myself, I suppose, as a bookish preadolescent I realized I was incapable of being stylish and reacted by embracing a look of yesteryear.  I favored pocket watches and fancied vests instead of polos.  For sleeping I asked my parents for a nightshirt, but I never could abide the tasseled cap that came along.  While very likely necessary in the days before adequate heating, I did not find it  comfortable. 

     Though today relatively few men wear hats, even in inclement weather, three quarters of a century ago hats were a flourishing industry.  Separate shops were devoted to women’s and to men’s hats.  My father and every other executive suburbanite in my neighborhood took the train to the city in a white shirt under a brimmed hat, usually a fedora.   Made of felt, these required periodic cleaning and blocking, sometimes provided by shops in the lobbies of business towers, next door to the barber who could provide a weekly trim.   With many subtle variations of style, such hats allowed those in the know as good an estimator of personal wealth as the model of a man’s car.  Yet this high point of refinement was also the beginning of a rapid decline.  Most members if my generation have never worn such a hat.  Even in a Chicago winter most commuters these days go altogether hatless.

     As a teenager I conceived the tastes in headwear I still maintain, though whether my persistence implies sound early discernment, a decay of imagination, or simply inertia I cannot tell.  I am fondest I think of soft tweed caps with a snap visor, a top button, and eight cloth panels, sometimes called a newsboy cap, though I don’t care for that name.  The look is, I fancy, entirely different from the narrower and stiffer cap which lacks the top button, known in the ‘fifties as “ivy-league style” which sometimes had a small belt in the back to match the back-belted trousers of the day.  

     My weakness for an old-fashioned look in general may be the seedbed from which this taste grew, but it surely strengthened when I saw photographs of Jack Kerouac in similar caps.  Like Whitman’s open collared shirts the style signaled an identification with the working class.  I like the way they are made of suit-like fabrics like tweed, yet comport well with jeans.  They have enough semiotic imprecision to be suggestive rather than directive.

     The same cannot be said for berets, which I have worn since undergraduate days.  As unambiguous in its signification as a Sioux war bonnet, the beret in America is primarily associated with artists and intellectuals.  Its appeal arose as a result of its connotations of Continental sophistication enhanced by a particular association, centuries-old, with art.  Self-portraits by Rembrandt, Monet, Cézanne, and Rousseau lie behind cartoon portrayals of beret-wearing painters.  Through the examples of leading jazz musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, and Gene Krupa, the beret came to signify expertise in the hipper modern arts as well. 

     During World War II berets were among the articles which those who wished to join the Resistance were asked to bring, and the exploits of these courageous underground fighters added to the headwear’s positive image.  Berets in France were common enough at that time to attract no attention while uncommon enough to help to distinguish partisan fighters.  There is indeed an entirely military strain of beret history in which they are worn as part of the uniform of a good many nations.  In the U. S. Army berets were made standard wear army-wide in 2001.

     The Army was on my mind when I bought my first beret, but it was obvious to any observer that I was more likely a draft resister than an admirer of the Green Berets.  In the late ‘sixties people would mock the rebellious youth, saying, “They claim to be non-conformists, but they all dress alike.”  But of course, to wear clothing with no “meaning” would be as pointless as speaking gibberish.  (It is also all but  impossible, since the mind will strive to make sense of whatever it encounters.)  Furthermore, as I recall, the crowd up and down Haight Street in 1967 exhibited what could only be called an embarrassment of riches when it came to costume choices.  Still, the old Beat ensemble of shades, beret, turtleneck, and sandals was sufficiently persistent to render anyone displaying all these signifiers at once already passé as well as overdetermined in an unseemly way.

     At a distant third in my own portfolio of hats is the Panama straw hat.  With connections to the headwear of tropical farmworkers, this hat has a lineage altogether different from the straw boaters with a flat crown and brim worn in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  These were once so popular in America that many areas recognized a “straw hat day” when men shifted from felt to straw in the springtime, usually in May to be followed by “felt hat day” in September.  Young men began to amuse themselves by knocking the hats off anyone still wearing straw after the deadline.  The jokers sometimes assaulted their victims, particularly if they encountered resistance.  A 1910 editorial in The Pittsburg Press denounces such hooliganism, blaming it on Theodore Roosevelt’s “anarchistic” principles.

     The most extreme example of such behavior is the so-called “Straw Hat Riots” of 1922 New York City.  On the floor of the stock exchange, horseplay had developed in which brokers would intentionally wear hats past the deadline knowing that their hats would be grabbed and smashed by others, all in good fun.   Then more rowdy young men in the street, some carrying sticks with attached hooks, began to snag the hats of strangers.  In 1922 a group of youths in Lower Manhattan began such pranks a few days early on September 13, precipitating brawls that led to the blockage of the Manhattan Bridge and the intervention of police.  On September 16 the New York Times ran an excited headline: “CITY HAS WILD NIGHT OF STRAW HAT RIOTS; Gangs of Young Hoodlums With Spiked Sticks Terrorize Whole Blocks. VICTIMS RUN THE GAUNTLET Youths Line Car Tracks and Snatch -- Mob of 1,000 Dispersed on Amsterdam Avenue.”  Then followed eight days of disorders.

     Boaters have now disappeared for everyone except students at Harrow and Uppingham, but Panama hats continue to enjoy wide popularity.  Introduced in Europe at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle, they impressed Frenchman with their fine texture and were described in the catalogue as “straw cloth.”  When the United States assumed the Panama Canal project, more of the hats reached this country. 

     While everyone knows Van Gogh’s self-portraits wearing straw hats, many other artists wore the same style, but in this case the arty associations carry little weight.  The straw hat in my wardrobe is, like its Central American ancestors, meant to keep the sun  off.  It occupies a closet shelf next to another which has been demoted to service during lawn work.  Both are descendants of a hat I bought one once in Mérida in the Yucatán.  Patricia and I had just had lunch at a little Lebanese restaurant where I , with reckless abandon, had ordered kibbeh nayeh, which is to say, raw lamb.  We found our way then to a tiny hat shop, just past the row of sellers of hammocks, in a strip with a good many apparently identical competitors, each offering, it seemed, every style.   In addition, the vendedor de sombreros was capable, with a bit of water and some expert reshaping, of altering and customizing the form.  From this hat-master I obtained my first straw hat, and it served until it developed a prominent and growing hole at the very front of the crown, and I was obliged to locate its successor.    

     Though the cloth cap, beret, and Panama hat have been my lifelong mainstays, I am not averse to other possibilities.  Indoors as well as out, I am fond of a knit skullcap I bought from a vendor in the Jma el Fna of Marrakech.  When I put it on, I feel fresh regret for having bargained hard and succeeded in  paying the man a few dimes less than he was asking.  Partial to boots, I never wore a cowboy hat until I came upon a straw version in a Salvation Army store.  Recalling accounts of Charles Olson, a man of daunting presence already who often augmented his height with prominent Western-style hats, I bought it. 

     I have a brimmed rigid canvas hat specifically for wearing on rainy days while traveling, but it is so ugly In have worn it only a few times.  Next time I pass by the Salvation Army I shall donate it.  Its place has been taken by a bucket hat which is not quite so hard to look at and which can be jammed into a pocket or the bottom corner of a backpack.  While style always carries meaning, and clothing may be read like a code, it is sometimes trumped by function. 

     Some, though, damn practicality, give rein to the imagination, and make clothing a primary art form.  Beau Brummel proudly maintained that he took five hours a day to dress and washed his boots in champagne (a refinement more effective in the telling than in the doing) before he was cast into debtor’s prison and. ended his days in an asylum.  The Dadaist Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven went about hung with spoons and materials found in the street, wearing a tomato-can bra and a bird cage on her shaved and shellacked head.  Her clothing, though wild, made far more sense than her verse.  The Shaivite saddhus and Digambara or “sky-clad” Jains make their statement by wearing nothing at all.

     Were an archaeologist of the future to come upon my hats, they would tell a less dramatic story.  The portrait they imply is surely incomplete, even misleading, but this is what allows them to indicate aspirations and vanities, even blind spots, and to be thus at least as revealing as straight facts.  The old hats moldering in the closet shelf may take pride in the fact that they lie, and tell the truth, occasionally an extraordinary truth, in their humbler way but akin all the same to the magnificent machinations of art.  As with any cultural artifact, once one begins accounting for themes, beauty, context, influences, and sources, there is no end; interpretation may proceed at liberty and halt whenever the investigator is no longer amused.

Marxism’s Limits

 

     I place this is the Politics category of my Index since the central point concerns not so much writings by Marx, Trotsky, or Breton as the attitudes of political people who identify as socialist, both in and out of power.

     Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes, those in parentheses refer to pages in Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, University of Michigan, 1970.

 

 

     The Soviet Union stopped claiming to represent the triumph of socialism a few decades ago when the regime was reborn in a new form, the equal to any of its predecessors in tyranny and chauvinism.   While few outside Russia’s borders will today defend Stalin, many leftist intellectuals in the West cling to remnants of Soviet-style “Socialist Realism,” a theory far more innocuous when its proponents are out of power.  In the vulgarest notion of Marxist literature, the hero is working class, the villain is capitalist, and the denouement is flushed pink with hope in works that can hardly be called “realism” at all, nor are they definitively socialist.  Simple-minded and reductive, this was the formula likeliest to prove comprehensible to those with little or no cultural background.  Social factors entirely unrelated to aesthetic concerns have kept this concept alive, though it is indefensible on theoretical grounds.  It remains influential today among socialists who should know better.

     Marxist writers have often, quite without warrant, considered their theory to be universally applicable, and have wandered from their proper territory in matters of ethical philosophy, economics, and politics into the aesthetic field.  In artistic questions Marxism has very limited though admittedly useful significance in recognizing the ideological elements of art and the nature of the production of culture in specific historical conditions.  The pressure of polemics in capitalist countries and the desire to maintain control in those that have claimed to be socialist have encouraged the mistaken notion that poetry and fiction can be judged by political criteria.  Equally misguided attempts to define Marxist science must similarly fail, as the criteria and assumptions of scientific research, like those of art, have little to do with social analysis. 

     Prescriptive literary models are not, however, inevitable accompaniments to Marxist economic analysis.  Marx and Engels themselves had traditional notions about literary value.  They discounted the radical writers of their day, preferring the classics.  Marx was, after all, an intellectual who read Ancient Greek for relaxation [1] and, when asked his favorite poets named Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Goethe [2].  Among modern novelists, Engels praised the royalist Balzac, saying that his pages managed to record more data about French society than “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period.”  Engels flatly declares that “The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art.” [3]  To him Balzac, in spite of his conscious political allegiances, encoded in his work a “revolutionary dialectic” [4] due to his insight and art, making his fiction more valuable (even to the revolutionary cause) than the well-intentioned novels of socialist partisans.

     Lenin likewise had an education that allowed him to read Latin poets and rhetoricians, as well as German classics like Goethe’s Faust.  Having little sympathy for his day’s avant-gardes, he wrote “I am a barbarian.  I cannot extol the products of expressionism, futurism, cubism, and other ‘isms.’”  To him there is “very little sense” in modern writing, “Why worship the new just because it is new?” [5]

     When he does address the question of the construction of a revolutionary culture, he recommends that modern artists begin with imitation, coopting “the best models, traditions and results of the existing culture.”  [6]  To him the individualistic and spiritual Tolstoy in a sense “the Mirror of Russian Revolution.” [7]

     Though Lenin repeatedly calls for a “free literature,” he at the same time he refers to art as no more than “’a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” [8]  Lacking susceptibility to art on aesthetic grounds, Lenin laid the foundation for later repression.  His preferences for writers like Chernyshevsky and Nekrasov was based on no artistic criteria, but only their perceived sympathy for the people.  Lenin never felt moved to inquire more subtly into literature.

     During the ‘twenties, though, prior to Stalin’s taking power, a good deal of latitude was given cultural workers.  Under Lunacharsky’s tenure as Minister for Education (People's Commissariat for Education or Narkompros) the Symbolists, Suprematists, Constructivists, and Futurists who might seem petty bourgeois individualists, were tolerated, both within and without Bolshevik circles.  Even apparently reactionary formations, such as the “changing landmarks” movement, which had been associated with the Whites, and a number of religious writers wrote and published in the first years after the Revolution, though the scope allowed to them shrank consistently during the ‘twenties and Lunacharsky, who had been pursuing “god-building,” the construction of new rational surrogates for religion, was removed from office in 1929, the same year Trotsky left the country.

     Before that time, however, even the committed revolutionary writers of the Kusnitsa (or Smithy) group demanded “complete freedom” in their manifesto and Bogdanov’s Proletkult sought autonomy from the Party.  To replace such undependable cultural groups an organization for writers willing to follow the government’s line without fail, the Russian Association of Proletarians Writers, was founded in 1925.  The preference for unquestioning loyalty from writers with little regard for other standards was clear by the time of the 1932 Central Committee’s order that all arts groups must come under centralized control.  In 1934, when Gorky prescribed Socialist Realism as the sole acceptable literary method in a speech to the Soviet Writers Congress, he established the parameters that later were enforced by the Kharkov Doctrine (later identified with Zhdanov) which required absolute obedience to the state line from intelligentsia and artists. 

     The Soviet example, now continued under Putin’s kleptocracy, has perniciously influenced other countries claiming to be socialist including China, Korea, and Cuba.  In spite of outstanding and creative Communist revolutionary poets like Mayakovsky, Césaire, Quasimodo, Neruda, Alberti, Hikmet, Darwish, and countless others, it is inevitably philistine timeservers who come to administer these repressive systems. 

     The relations between artists, even those, like the Proletkult members, who are sympathetic to socialism, and bureaucratic ideologues has often been uneasy in capitalist countries as well.  In 1925 Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Péret, and Unik joined the French Communist Party though neither side knew quite what use to make of the other.  Though Surrealists officially supported (for a time) the Party, their delegates were viewed with great suspicion as bourgeois bohemians, solipsistic individualists whose writing style could never be popular among the masses.  The leftists were particularly offended by real or fancied homosexuality which to them meant degeneracy, while many Surrealists objected to the imposition of a mandated political line for the movement.  Breton was repeatedly criticized by the French party’s Central Committee for insisting on maintaining his Surrealist identity along with his Marxist one. [10] Aragon, Buñuel, and Unik abandoned Surrealism when obliged to choose between the art movement and the party.  In later years Surrealism and communism remained intertwined in Situationism and Franklin Rosemont’s Chicago Surrealist Group.

     Leon Trotsky was one figure prominent in the Bolshevik revolution who avoided the narrow-minded restrictions of Stalinist Socialist Realism, deviations which, among others, resulted in his exile and eventual assassination.  In 1938 Breton visited Trotsky in Mexico and they composed a “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art” [11].  This document opposes “those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of ends foreign to itself” and insists on utter freedom as a necessary precondition for the production of art.  “The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his exploitations –- these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable.” 

     While conceding the role of central economic planning, Trotsky and Breton contend that direction from the top is wholly out of place in the realm of culture.  They could hardly have been more emphatic in their contention that autonomy is imperative not only for the arts, but for all intellectual work.  The reader can sense in their urgent words the distress of suffering Soviet writers and revolutionaries under Stalin. 

If, for the better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without constraint from outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.

     While the manifesto compares the threat fascism poses to culture to the legendary depredations of the ancient Vandals and maintains that art or science in the cause of reaction is in an “absolutely intolerable” position, the authors were careful to object in equally strong terms to government control of writers in the Soviet Union.  Breton and Trotsky express guarded sympathy with anarchists, Futurists, and Freud, implying acceptance of a popular front broader than any the Comintern would have tolerated. 

     Yet they went further, to a far more sweeping claim.  In the end they assert that, since art offers fresh perspectives “expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time,” all art is in fact at heart revolutionary.  For them “true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it.” 

     In signing this statement Trotsky was perhaps seeking allies in his attacks on Stalin and his attempts to construct a Fourth International independent of Soviet rulers.  Yet when he held power years earlier he had espoused similar views in his book Literature and Revolution (1924).  In this volume he lays out the theoretical basis for his view of revolutionary art as well as discussing the current Russian literary scene in rich and lively detail, sometimes vituperative.  Few, even among specialists in the period, will recognize the names of many of the writers he discusses.  Yet Trotsky has strong opinions on them all, which he expresses in often colorful language.  His polemics do not, however, focus directly on the class origin or loyalty of the authors, or on their party fealty, but rather on their personal qualities or their allegiance to metaphysical ideas.  Thus to him Blok’s work is “romantic, symbolic, mystic, formless, and unreal,” (116) and Schkapskaya’s religious inclinations are “so organic, so biologic, so gynecologic.”  His misogyny allows him to include in his ridicule Akhmatova and other “real and near poetesses.” (41).

     Trotsky’s approach, while impressionistic, is based in theory.  Trotsky begins with the assumption that the art of every era reflects its socio-economic structure, art, in fact is “the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch.” (9)  Yet the evolution of such an internalized Weltanschauung, what Trotsky calls “the formation of a new culture” requires “considerable time.” (184)  Those qualified in the arts at the time of revolution are inevitably bourgeois and even those who are sympathetic to the cause of the people will be “not the artists of the proletarian Revolution, but her ‘fellow-travelers’” (57).  Proletarian literature is, he maintains, unlikely to emerge before the dictatorship of the proletariat has given way to the altogether classless society of communism in which art will have no class character.  Thus “there can be no question of the creation of a new culture.” because “there is no proletarian culture” and “there never will be” due to the brevity of the transitional period.  Furthermore, during this “brief period” (185) the regime will be unable to afford much art and will be obliged to dedicate its resources to material economic progress. (185) 

     These rosy expectations sound sometimes quite like utopianism.  Under communism according to Trotsky “the powerful force of competition” over wealth under capitalism will be alchemically transmuted to “a higher and more fertile form,” “the struggle for one’s opinion, for one’s project, for one’s taste.”  Using Freudian language, he says that what had been greed will be “sublimated,” “channelized into technique, into construction which also includes art (230).”  The book’s conclusion sounds romantic, starry-eyed. 

Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant.  Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build people’s palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree . . .Life in the future will not be monotonous. (254)

The prospect inspires Trotsky to grand and lofty rhetorical flights.

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher biologic type, or, if you please, a superman. (254-255)

     Of course, a hundred years later we are aware that these hopeful expectations have not been realized in history.  The whole idea of the inevitability of the coming of communism under a workers’ government as predicted in The Communist Manifesto has always sounded like a kind of messianism, though it looked more plausible a century ago.  Still, this question has no bearing on Trotsky’s skepticism about the possibility of proletarian culture or his recommendation that artists must have, in the words of the 1938 Manifesto, “free choice” and “the absence of all restrictions” as “inalienable” rights.

     Ironically, on the cultural side, Breton actively exercised his Surrealist leadership in a dictatorial manner himself, parodying the official Soviet government authoritarianism without knowing it, prescribing requirements and ousting those he saw as dissidents while maintaining a more libertarian stance in theory.  Radical artists as well as dogmatic rulers, it seems, may seek to impose their visions on others.  Under externally imposed limits, art can prove resourceful.  Roman Catholicism did not disable the brilliance of Dante and Eisenstein’s imagination glows brightly even under Stalin’s scrutiny.  Imposing non-aesthetic requirements does not preclude the creation of great literature and great paintings though the interference of reductive and overly confident systems is likely to set them askew.   

     Surely the strongest revolutionary movement must be one in which each field’s progress is guided, not by expertise dictated from outside but by practitioners and their peers.  Farmers are experts in farming; printers in printing.  The principle is no different in intellectual work than in the production of goods.  Scientists must have autonomy to do good science, and artists must have no less.  There is no “party line” in aesthetic endeavors any more than there is in particle physics or hydraulic engineering. 

     Since the Romantic Age, a good share of artists has been politically radical, for the most part more or less on the left, though with extreme rightists as well.  This critical stance is not dictated by aesthetic theory, but rather by the compassion of the creators upon witnessing the suffering of the poor and the indifference of the comfortable.  Since the whole business of art is the exchange of subjectivities, the artist is likely to be more adept than some with the practice of empathy.  In a curious ironic turn, for some the spontaneous charity of the heart entails, or at least renders attractive or acceptable, the imposition of non-aesthetic standards on their own work as well as, what is worse, seeking to extend these irrational limits to others.  Every advance toward socialism, toward the greater well-being of most people, is welcome, while at the same time each expert should be allowed sovereign freedom in every field whether it be fishing, mining, construction, chemistry, mathematics, or, yes, art. 

 

 

 

1.  This journalist’s questionnaire is reprinted in Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow, 436

2.  Letter from Marx to Engels. Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow, 261

3.  Letter to Margaret Harkness.  Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow: Progress, 93.

4.  Letter to Laura Lafargue Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, 439.

5.  See K. Dasgupta, “Lenin on Literature,” Indian Literature XIII, 3 (September). 

6.  “Rough Draft of a Resolution on Proletarian Culture” (1920).

7.  “Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution” (1908).

8.  “Party Organisation and Party Literature” (1905).

9.  Proletkult, under the leadership of Lenin’s rival Bogdanov, was absorbed into the education ministry in 1920.  The Kuznitsa writers challenged the regime from the left, denouncing, for instance, Lenin’s New Economic Policy, but they moderated their deviations carefully enough to survive until 1932

10.  See Robert S. Short, “The Politics of Surrealism, 1920-36,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 1, No. 2, Left-Wing Intellectuals between the Wars (1966). 

11.  Though signed by André Breton and Diego Rivera, the statement was written by Trotsky and Breton.  In a translation by, Dwight MacDonald it appeared The Partisan Review 1938, vol. IV #1 , Fall 1938.

12.  A high point of Trotsky’s polemic is surely his ridicule of Biely who, he says, “day in and day out caught in his immortal soul certain little insects and spread them out on his fingernail,” etc. (Literature and Revolution, 54).

Every Reader’s Dryden

 

This is the seventeenth in the Every Reader’s Poets series, essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In these I limit my focus to the discussion of only a few of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.  For a complete list, see section 5G of the Index which is always posted among the current month’s essays in the archive on the right of the page. 

 

 

     John Dryden dominated the literary scene of his day.  He was the first poet laureate officially named by the crown (in spite of his youthful adherence to Cromwell’s Protectorate) and he, along with Pope, somewhat later, exemplified the era’s neo-Classical taste.  Like Shakespeare he had a financial interest in a theater, the King’s Company, for which he agreed to produce three plays a year, and he supported himself for decades with income from the stage, composing twenty-nine plays, both comedies and tragedies, once popular, but rarely performed today.  His theatrical reputation  is not aided by the fact that he took it upon himself to improve a number of Shakespeare’s plays. 

     He wrote important critical works such as An Essay of Dramatick Poesy and The Art of Satire as well as doing significant work in translation, producing versions of Vergil, Persius, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Homer that were widely read and praised.

      Though  he once magisterially dictated taste, as literary standards evolved the appeal  of his own poetry diminished considerably.  A couple of generations after his death, Samuel Johnson, an excellent critic, anticipated many readers since when he found Dryden “not often pathetick,” with little skill in “exhibiting the genuine operations of the heart,” a poet more “of strong reason than quick sensibility.”  This impression has since strengthened, magnified by the Romantic prejudices many literati retain that view his sensibility as lacking in passion, and his style as pedantic and artificial. 

     In addition, the intellectual controversies, political and artistic, that excited his day now arouse only antiquarian interest, and many of his strongest works are long polemical poems that today require a quantity of footnotes intolerable for impatient twenty-first century readers.  The satires for which he is best-known represent a genre almost altogether absent in today’s poetry.

     When Dryden was writing, readers relished lengthy symbolic exercises in wit, even when these were composed in poetry, fueling constant sallies back and forth between controversialists with every exchange sold to the public in what are called “pamphlet wars.”  The topics might be political, theological, or  aesthetic.  Late seventeenth century authors could depend on the common reader’s familiarity with Classical literature, since Greek and Latin were fundamental to the educational system until quite recently.  Most of today’s readers know little either of Dryden’s topical interests or his Classical lore.

     Though the passing of centuries and the variation in taste may have made some of Dryden’s poetry an acquired taste, his masterful skill can still impress and even amuse a modern reader.  One piece that requires no annotation is a passage from Dryden’s translation of Book IV of Lucretius dealing with sexual positions, often reprinted under the title “The Posture.” 

 

Of like importance is the posture too,

In which the genial feat of Love we do:

For as the females of the four foot kind,

Receive the leapings of their Males behind;

So the good Wives, with loins uplifted high,

And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try:

For in that posture will they best conceive:

Not when supinely laid they frisk and heave;

For active motions only break the blow,

And more of Strumpets than of Wives they show;

When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow.

Endearments eager, and too brisk a bound,

Throws off the Plow-share from the furrow’d ground.

But common Harlots in conjunction heave,

Because ’tis less their business to conceive

Than to delight, and to provoke the deed;

A trick which honest Wives but little need.

 

     The notion of Dryden as Dryasdust is hardly compatible with this bit of advice in spite of its Latin source.  Lucretius maintains that making love face to face is typical of “Strumpets,” as it is said to be less likely to lead to conception than when women “Receive the leapings of their Males behind,” making this the appropriate position for married couples.  The putative interest in family planning covers an explicitly lubricious tone (“leapings,” “frisk and heave,” “mingled liquors”) as the artfully turned couplets tumble one after another toward the passage’s conclusion.  Its wit does not suffer from the fact that the reader may well think that even “honest Wives” may wish to employ “delight,” for their own sake as well as for their mates. 

     The background rhythm of iambic pentameter allows subtle variations to contribute significant sound effects.  For instance, the extra syllable in “genial” sounds like a grace note celebrating the joys of the bed.  The extra foot in “And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try” recalls in sonic cadence the physical movements of love-making.  (The device occurs again a few lines later in “When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow, where again the prolongation is palpable.)

     Absalom and Achitophel, a satire of over a thousand lines, is a prominent example of Dryden’s topical work, today much praised by specialists and little scanned by anyone else.  Readers wishing to understand the poem today must not only be more familiar than most moderns with the story from Samuel II of Absalom’s ill-considered rebellion against David, but also with the details of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-1681 when some parliamentarians sought to exclude Charles II’s brother James from succession because of his Roman Catholicism.  The bills failed and James took the throne only to be deposed (after suspending Parliament and ruling for three years by decree) in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. 

    Understanding Dryden’s own politics is complicated by the fact that, when the Protectorate was in the ascendance, he worked for Cromwell’s government (as Milton and Marvell did) and wrote “Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell” in the praise of its leader in which he depicted the overthrow of Charles I as the founding of a new and better age.  Yet after the Restoration he scrambled to praise Charles II with equal enthusiasm. 

     Perhaps he was primarily a defender of the status quo. In one passage from Absalom and Achitophel he argues that any socio-political change will be for the worse, and therefore defends reaction as a general principle. 

 

If they may Give and Take when e'r they please,

Not Kings alone, (the Godheads Images,)

But Government it self at length must fall

To Natures state; where all have Right to all.

Yet, grant our Lords the People Kings can make,

What Prudent men a setled Throne would shake?

For whatsoe'r their Sufferings were before,

That Change they Covet makes them suffer more.

All other Errors but disturb a State,

But Innovation is the Blow of Fate.

If ancient Fabricks nod, and threat to fall,

To Patch the Flows, and Buttress up the Wall,

Thus far 'tis Duty; but here fix the Mark:

For all beyond it is to touch our Ark.

To change Foundations, cast the Frame anew,

Is work for Rebels who base Ends pursue:

At once Divine and Humane Laws controul;

And mend the Parts by ruine of the Whole.

The Tampering World is subject to this Curse,

To Physick their Disease into a worse.

 

     Thus, while no moralistic pedant, he was definitely conservative politically.  One must imagine a vision of an ignorant mob behind the “they” of the first line of this passage describing those who wish to arbitrarily alter the order of things, though in doing so they are very nearly blasphemous (as the king is the “image” of Godhead).  Radicals are, like Lucifer, rebels against both “Divine and Humane Laws.”   For some this preference for avoiding change is an adequate explanation of his shifting loyalties, and the fear of disorder conveniently conflates with a writer’s appeals for the patronage of the powerful.  The image of reformers as quack doctors who increase rather than relieve suffering must have had resonance for seventeenth century patients.

     A passage from the mock-heroic epic Mac Flecknoe exemplifies Dryden’s vituperative polemical style.  The entire work is devoted to ridiculing Thomas Shadwell, a rival playwright and political opponent whom Dryden considers the Emperor of “all the realms of Non-sense.”   The tone of the work is suggested by the fact that Dryden, by suppressing Shadwell’s name and writing instead “Sh----,” a convention that allows the reader to take the word to be shit as in “But loads of Sh—— almost choakt the way.”  In the following passage Dryden describes the devolution of drama since Elizabethan times, paralleled by the decline in a neighborhood which once included defensive fortifications implying an age of heroism, but which has since become a red-light district.  “Augusta” in  the first line is simply a name for London.  

 

Close to the walls which fair Augusta bind,

(The fair Augusta much to fears inclin’d)

An ancient fabrick, rais’d t’inform the sight,

There stood of yore, and Barbican it hight:

A watch Tower once; but now, so fate ordains,

Of all the pile an empty name remains.

From its old Ruins Brothel-houses rise,

Scenes of lewd loves, and of polluted joys.

Where their vast Courts, the Mother-Strumpets keep,

And, undisturb’d by Watch, in silence sleep.

Near these a Nursery erects its head,

Where queens are form’d, and future heroes bred;

Where unfledg’d actors learn to laugh and cry,

Where infant punks their tender voices try,

And little Maximins the gods defy.

Great Fletcher never treads in buskins here,

Nor greater Jonson dares in socks appear;

But gentle Simkin just reception finds

Amidst this Monument of vanisht minds:

Pure Clinches, the suburbian Muse affords;

And Panton waging harmless war with words.

Here Flecknoe, as a place to fame well known,

Ambitiously design’d his Sh—–‘s throne.

 

     In this scene the urban decay is apparent in the “Ruins” of old buildings, moral decline in the proliferation of prostitution, and aesthetic weakness in the popularity of clownish characters like Simkin and Panton.  The scene is for Dryden a “Monument of vanish’d minds.” 

     A song from one of Dryden’s plays provides relief from the rolling pentameters of the preceding three poems.   This piece from Marriage à la Mode was popular enough to have been included in the 1673 book Choice Songs and Ayres for One Voyce, so we can imagine people singing it at home after hearing it in the theater.

 

I

Why should a foolish marriage vow,

Which long ago was made,

Oblige us to each other now,

When passion is decayed?

We loved, and we loved, as long as we could,

Till our love was loved out in us both;

But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:

’Twas pleasure first made it an oath.

 

II

If I have pleasures for a friend,

And further love in store,

What wrong has he, whose joys did end,

And who could give no more?

’Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me,

Or that I should bar him of another:

For all we can gain, is to give ourselves pain,

When neither can hinder the other.

 

     The Puritans had closed the theaters in 1642 and, in reaction, when drama returned in 1660 following Charles II’s taking the throne, the stage, only just free from several decades of prohibition, filled with libertines and loose women.  Reminiscent of the sophisticated hedonism of Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things” and familiar enough in an age when some espouse polyamory, this song must have offered audiences the thrill of transgression in the late seventeenth century. 

     Perhaps Dryden might object that this selection has leaned on his slightly improper poems.  If so, the intention  has simply been to challenge his reputation as dull and to make him accessible to readers unfamiliar with his work or with the period.  It is not, however, altogether inaccurate. Pepys, after all, hardly a prude himself, objected to Dryden’s play An Evening’s Love as “too smutty.”  Dryden was one of the last who could write of most any topic in verse with a poised and witty tone, constructing elaborate  rhetorical periods well-shaped and balanced, juggling abstractions often, it seems, simply for the fun of it.  At the same time in his own way he assumed the laureateship quite seriously, speaking for the nation in celebrations of royalty in poems like Britannia Rediviva and Threnodia Augustalis. 

     Like his contemporary Milton, Dryden does not enjoy the favor of modern taste.  This may be all the more reason that the reader may find in him something unexpected and once again new.  His craftsmanship and ingenuity remain exemplary in an age when the sound of poetry is largely neglected and rhetoric, long the heart of literary theory, has acquired a bad name.  Dryden’s mastery of the poetic line is evident throughout his work.  His poetry as well as his plays are at their best when read aloud.