Meredith's Ridiculous Egoist

 

     Reader may wish to have a look at my piece on “Meredith’s Poetic Novel: Diana of the Crossways” at https://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2025/09/merediths-poetic-novel-diana-of.html.  Page references in parentheses refer to the Penguin English Library edition edited by George Woodcock.

 

     The fiction of George Meredith is distinguished from that of other Victorian novelists by a number of factors.  He stands practically alone in his feminism and he can be compared only to late Henry James and perhaps the George Eliot of Middlemarch in his portrayal of the gossamer threads of motive that precipitate our acts (and velleities as well).  He was a great practitioner and theoretician of comedy.  Yet surely Meredith’s most striking characteristic is his mannered style which can occasionally oblige even a seasoned reader to scan a page a second time.  He is capable of passages which are often delightfully witty, syntactically complex, and sometimes of staggering beauty in which style is clearly the governing principle guiding the content which must be content simply to tag along. 

     Oscar Wilde skewered the downside of Meredith’s remarkable prose in “The Decay of Lying.”

 

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate. Somebody in Shakespeare−−Touchstone, I think−− talks about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever he is, he is not a realist.

 

     In his influential theoretical essay in “An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,” Meredith argues that comedy, as opposed to humor and satire, encourages moral behavior and aims at reforming human folly.  No carnival license for him, instead “comedy is the fountain of sound sense.”  In his view “it is the first condition of sanity to believe” that “our civilization is founded in common-sense” (a term more problematic than Meredith allowed) and it is the violations of these norms in his view that gives rise to “the contrasts the Comic Spirit perceives,” which provides the comic writer the work of correcting these deviations.  (In a writer so modern in many ways, it is a bit startling to find moralism stern enough to find Restoration comedy “beyond blushing” and full of “cynical licentiousness.”) 

     But his heart seldom seems seldom centered on the censorious correction of human error.  What sustains a novel by Meredith is his talent for striking figures of speech, his playful wit, and his elegant if somewhat elaborate style.  Even on the theme of the nature of comedy, in the novel the topic is organized about Meredith’s fanciful imps that crouch about their figure of fun mocking, hardly a notion compatible with common sense.

     The witticisms of the formidable Mrs. Montstuart Jenkinson such as her characterization of Vernon as “a Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar” or of Laetitia “here she comes with a romantic tale on her eyelashes” (like those of Meredith’s Diana) are surely to be appreciated for their cleverness alone (42).  A longer passage from the “Prelude” which generally sketches the narrative’s progress raises the author’s rhetorical standard high over everyday usage such that the exuberance of his language becomes the point far more than any strictures on proper behavior.

 

     Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it seem to sail the stiffest:—there is a touch of pathos. The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody's expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the actual person. Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll you over and squeeze your body for the briny drops. There is the innovation.

 

     Here Meredith opens with a ship as a metaphor for his story and water as ballast identified with pathos.  It is surely inaccurate to claim that every narrative must have pathos.  While a Chaplin movie may well include a good deal there will be none at all in with the Three Stooges.  Yet few would notice to dubious claim as the ingenious figures of speech carry the reader along like a tide.  “It can hardly be the cargo,” i. e. The Egoist is fundamentally comic rather than sentimental or melodramatic.  The image shifts then to clothing; the egoist derives his self-worth from the opinions of others, “clothing himself” at others’ expense, yet finding himself so embarrassed (“naked”) that he will serve as a personification  of pity.  Yet, as the comedy is sustained, he does not demand your tears (after the manner of Little Nell), and “there is the innovation.”

     This is all very well, if slightly elaborately stated, but the following paragraph which introduces the figure of the Egoist is even more distinctly characteristic of Meredith.  Here the reader encounters the imps of comedy, central to the book’s themes however far distant from commonsensical concepts.

 

     You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time and country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what we may with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface and is distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality, have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in him, when they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on the heading of the records baldly (where brevity is most complimentary) as a gentleman of family and property, an idol of a decorous island that admires the concrete. Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to kindle detective vision: malignly do they love to uncover ridiculousness in imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of Egoism they pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that their grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their game, never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and antic, unknown to himself, and comes out in the native steam which is their scent of the chase. Instantly off they scour, Egoist and imps. They will, it is known of them, dog a great House for centuries, and be at the birth of all the new heirs in succession, diligently taking confirmatory notes, to join hands and chime their chorus in one of their merry rings round the tottering pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as if they had (possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus of Egoism in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the stuff of the family. They dare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober, while socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait. (36-37)

 

     The imps practice a kind of “freakish wickedness,” but they also may bide their time, conceding their object’s prestigious social role and importance under feudalism.  Yet it is the very artificiality of his aristocratic standing that guarantees he will prove by the late nineteenth century ridiculous.  There is after all, something inherently absurd in the fact that he has always been highly regarded, purely because of the accident of his birth.  He is certain eventually therefore to fall prey to fatuous “frolic and antic,” emitting steam which attracts the imps with their “detective vision.”  Like pagan orgiasts they dance in “merry rings” about the great man, the “colossus,” who has, like Britain’s aristocracy in Victorian times, outlived his social usefulness and thus become preposterous and laughable. 

     Here the reader finds a rich stew of figures of speech.  The egoist is an “idol,” a “colossus,” while less perceptive readers who take his pose for his true nature are “angels.”  The imps, meanwhile, are like a besieging army with their camp pitched all about the egoist as he transforms into a sort of absurd engine puffing steam as the imps (and the readers) look on amused.  

     Meredith is as earnest a Victorian as Matthew Arnold, but he is far more of an aesthete.  While he maintained high-minded principles of moral behavior, social justice, and political idealism, he was fond as well of playing with words and of building ingenious verbal structures that are more obviously entertaining than they are improving.  Surely considered only as a reformer or an ethicist he would have little name by this time; it is as an imaginative and inventive storyteller who can hold the reader’s interest with his language alone that we read him today.  The reader knew Willoughby for an ass when he first appeared.  The novel would have been excruciatingly prolonged had that demonstration been the point of the story.  Instead Meredith fills more than half a thousand pages with wit, fascinating figures of speech, and rhetoric by turns stately and effervescent.  One concludes with a wistful regret in part arising from seeing Laetitia accepting a loveless marriage and in part for one’s own departure from Patterne Hall after a pleasant stay.  Though Meredith may have conceived of comedy ultimately serving the cause of the betterment of humanity, he, and we as well, will consider that we have gained something merely by having our fancy tickled. 

Jazz and Poetry

 

Poetry and jazz at the 2019 Italian Fusion Festival in Dublin

 

 

 

     This survey is idiosyncratic and far from exhaustive.  Far from attempting a definitive scholarly study, this essay is an impressionistic sketch of collaboration between the two arts by a critic who is as well a practitioner.

 

 

     Music and poetry have always been closely allied arts.  Lyric poetry was once regularly performed with music as its name indicates.  The Greek muse Euterpe, originally associated specifically with music, came to govern lyric poetry as well [1].  Some troubadour cansos bear as title the name of the tune to which they were meant to be sung.  In fact, until the Renaissance virtually all short poems were performed to music.  In the past half millennium the silent reading of poetry on a page has become the norm, but it remains the fact that most people continue to consume the two arts at once in the form of pop music. 

     From the early years of jazz some intellectuals were fascinated by its rhythms, while others were inspired only with disdain.  Gilbert Seldes in The Seven Lively Arts (1924) reflects this ambivalent reception when he says jazz is the “characteristic American expression,” and then adds that this fact is recognized “with a shudder by the English and with real joy by the French.”  In the United States a few poets were particularly intrigued by African-American culture, and some decided that their work would be appropriately complemented by jazz accompaniment.  Vachel Lindsay’s flamboyant performances led many to find his style jazz-like (though the poet himself felt distaste for jazz).  His “The Daniel Jazz” represented the improvisatory cadences of a Pentecostal preacher (compete with call and response instructions) [2].  Perhaps the most succinct view of the white Bohemia’s attitude toward Black America opens Mina Loy’s "The Widow's Jazz": “The white flesh quakes to the negro soul.”  Nor did all Black intellectuals appreciate jazz.  In the era of the Harlem Renaissance, writers like Du Bois and Alain Locke favored music like that of R. Nathaniel Dett who was capable of clothing Black material in concert hall European Romanticism over what they viewed as the music of brothels and bars.

     Among the writers of the twenties Langston Hughes stands out for his unapologetic partisanship for blues and jazz and his use of syncopated rhythms in his poetry.  He also pioneered spoken word performances with jazz, reading before the Playwriter's Circle in 1926 with musical backing  and shortly thereafter as part of the Lincoln University’s Glee Club concert.  During the 1950s Lawrence Lipton privately recorded Hughes doing poetry with a changing group of musicians [3]. In 1958 The Weary Blues was released by MGM on which Hughes reads with two ensembles, one led by Leonard Feather and the other by Charles Mingus [4].  The same year he performed with the Doug Parker Band on the Canadian television program The 7 O’clock Show.

     Many white writers as well combined words and jazz during the 1950s.   Kenneth Patchen had, during the ‘forties, read his work on the radio while playing jazz records in the background, obliging him to adjust to the musicians’ pace, the opposite of the ordinary relationship.  In the ‘50s he appeared  in venues like San Francisco's Blackhawk Club and The Cellar, and eventually Oakland's Civic Auditorium, and the Los Angeles Concert Hall, accompanied by Allyn Ferguson and the Chamber Jazz Sextet with whom he recorded Kenneth Patchen with the Chamber Jazz Sextet (1957).  In 1959 he recorded Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada with the Alan Neil Quartet.

     Beat writers recorded several historic albums of jazz and poetry during the ‘fifties.  Rod McKuen read poetry in San Francisco area clubs in the late ‘fifties and released an album of poetry and jazz titled Beatsville in 1959. Ken Nordine meanwhile issued his first album of Word Jazz (1957) with the Fred Katz group including Chico Hamilton under an alias [5].  David Amram collaborated with Jack Kerouac and in 1957, he, along with Jack Kerouac and poets Howard Hart and Philip Lamantia performed at the Brata Art Gallery on East 10th Street, in New York.  Kerouac enjoyed  sufficient celebrity that he even appeared on the Steve Allen Plymouth show in 1959 backed by Allen on the piano.  Later that year Allen and Kerouac released Poetry for the Beat Generation.  Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti read with the Cellar Jazz Quartet on Poetry Readings in the Cellar (1957) followed the next year by Ferlinghetti’s Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower and other Poems and then in 1960 by Rexroth’s Poetry and Jazz at the Blackhawk.  Allen Ginsberg’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1969) featured trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Elvin Jones and Ted Joans Jazzpoems (1979) with musicians such as Andreas Leep (bass), Dietrich Rauschtenberger (drums), Ralf Falk (guitar), and Uli Espenlaub (keyboards) [6].  In 1957 jazz poet Jack Micheline was given the Revolt in Literature award by a panel that included Charles Mingus with whom he sometimes performed. 

     Mingus was in fact notable among prominent musicians receptive to using words other than song lyrics in their performances.   While poets were interested in exploring the possibilities of reading with a jazz accompaniment, with the musicians often following the poet’s lead, jazz had from the start balanced words and music in songs, sometimes beautiful and sometimes mediocre as well as accommodating shouts (“Yeah!’ “Play it!”) and scat-singing.  During the ‘fifties a few musicians began to add elements of spoken word with Mingus leading the movement.  In the late ‘fifties he released a series of recordings with poets.  In 1957 the title track of his album Clown featured the writer for radio Jean Shepherd whom he admired.  Shepherd’s work had affinities to jazz improvisation since he typically told his stories without a written text.  The following year Mingus collaborated with Langston Hughes to produce one side of the Weary Blues album and in 1959 tracks he had done with Hughes and Lonnie Elder two years earlier were released as A Modern Jazz Symposium of Music and Poetry.  Mingus Ah Um (1959) included the “Fables of Faubus” which skewered the racist governor with devastating ridicule, shouted rather than sung by the musicians.  Other artists experimented as well, notably Ornette Coleman, who collaborated with Frank O’Hara and Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka).  During this golden era for jazz and poetry, many others, including Archie Shepp and Sun Ra also included spoken word in  their performances.  Jayne Cortez married the free jazz exponent Ornette Coleman released Celebrations & Solitudes: The Poetry of Jayne Cortez (1974) with Richard Davis on bass and Unsubmissive Blues (1979) with the Firespitters.

     While these recordings arose in the jazz and beat poetry milieux, the following decade brought the arrival of Black Power and the allied Black Arts Movement.  Writers like Sonia Sanchez and Haki Madhubuti explored the intersection of politics with jazz and poetry [7] and the Last Poets collective with their recordings The Last Poets (1970), followed by  This Is Madness (1971) and Chastisement (1972) [8].  Meanwhile Gil Scott-Heron’s first album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970) had an unlikely popular hit with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."      

     More recently, the rise of hip hop culture, including manipulated DJing in the early seventies by figures like Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa and poetry with music (though sampling is scarcely jazz) such as the Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight (1979) and Grandmaster Flash’s album The Message (1982). 

     A good many jazz and poetry collaborations have appeared since the turn of the present century, including work by Steve Dalachinsky, Barry Wallenstein, Yusef Komunyakaa, Golda Solomon, and Allan Harris, among many others.  The hip hop tradition continues with artists like Kendrick Lamar.  The Jerry Jazz Musician website offers a great deal of information on many performers.  Many musicians and poets around the world have contributed as well, including numerous performances, many recorded, by British poets such as Michael Horovitz and Christopher Logue.  Among Eastern European practitioners have been Czech trumpeter Štepánka Balcarová and Polish vocalist Malgorzata Hutek’s who accompanied Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav’s sonnets and improvisations by Russian artists Vladimir Tarasov and Alexey Kruglov.  Perhaps the outstanding achievement in the genre is Speak-Spake-Spoke with Kirpal Gordon reading from his book Eros in Sanskrit with the great Claire Daly Band.  In this ensemble the music and words are elegantly balanced with the voice acting as another instrument, taking solos on occasion, but allowing the musicians free rein. 

     Music and poetry have been allied from archaic times, and poetry with jazz has already a hundred year history.  Jazz is hip for a number of reasons.  The association of jazz with African-Americans lends the combination an edgy radical avant-garde aspect, emphasized by its enthusiastic adoption by bohemians and socially conscious rappers.  Though few poets improvise (though free-stylers do exist) and, in fact, many other musical genres are improvised (notably Indian classical music both Hindustani and Carnatic), the improvisatory element in jazz is attractive to the Romantic view of art, emphasizing freedom and individual genius.  The rise of spoken word shows has to some extent pushed back against the post-Renaissance relegation of poetry to the silently read printed page, to a degree restoring poetry to its historic place as an entertainment, similar to a play or a concert.  If jazz is one of America’s greatest cultural contributions, the combination of jazz with poetry is its offspring, arising first in the United States, in minority racial and social milieux, yet blossoming into art meaningful and beautiful to all.

 

 

 

 

1.  Words and music were likewise joined for Melpomene, Thalia, Terpsichore, and Polyhymnia who represented tragedy, comedy, choral and sacred song respectively.  Calliope was the muse of epic which, while not sung, was chanted to the accompaniment of the phorminx.

2.  In spite of his hostility to jazz and his old-fashioned racial stereotyping, Lindsay was also influential In encouraging the young Hughes.

3.  This historic material has to my knowledge only been aired, for instance on a 1959 KNX radio program titled “The Beatniks” and as part of 1963 Conference at UCLA. 

4.  Hughes also appeared with Mingus’s group at the Five Spot and the Village Vanguard.

5.  This was followed by Love Words and Son of Word Jazz (1958) and a long series of further albums, popular among friends of cannabis.  Nordine later recorded with The Grateful Dead and released his final album at the age of eighty-seven. 

6.  Joans’ recording of “Jazz Must be a Woman” can be heard on I Giganti Del Jazz Vol. 96.

7.  Their recorded performances are much later, for instance, Haki Madhubuti with Nicole Mitchell on Liberation Narratives (2014) and Sonia Sanchez with bassist Christian McBride in The Movement Revisited (2020).

8.  Other recordings by members of the group include The Original Last Poets - Right On Original Soundtrack (1971), Black Spirits - Festival Of New Black Poets In America (1972), Hustlers Convention (1973), At Last (1973), Jazzoetry (1976), Delights of the Garden (1977) Oh My People (1984), Freedom Express (1988), Retro Fit (1992), Holy Terror (1993), Scatterap/Home (1994), Time Has Come (1997), The Prime Time Rhyme of The Last Poets - Best Of Vol. 1 (1999), The Prime Time Rhyme of The Last Poets - Best Of Vol. 2 (1999), Understand What Black Is (2018), and Transcending Toxic Times (2019). 

9.  Komunyakaa also collaborated with Sascha Feinstein on several anthologies of jazz-influenced poetry titled The Jazz Poetry Anthology (vols. 1 and 2). 

Transformations

     I suppose we must accept the physicists’ telling us that everything is drifting toward a meaningless entropy, but that is the long long view and provides all the more reason to feel pleasure at finding within the ineluctable galactic tides eroding ordered patterns now and then contrary eddies within which little miracles of creation occur.  Floating with the current and struggling always as we do, against breakdown, dissolution, and the horrid odors of decay, we welcome the solace of something that, instead of simply rotting, mutates, or, better still, we rejoice at what seems a creation ex nihilo.  Surely William James, the pioneering investigator of mysticism and revelation, had something similar in mind when he recovered from despair with a new determination: “I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world.”  The individual may be doomed to lose but surely that fact only makes resistance more heroic.  Each of us is Achilles, striving to do great deeds while under an unappealable death sentence. 

    One need be neither a philosopher nor a warrior, though, to delight in transformation.  What young child is not charmed upon learning how a wormlike caterpillar can shut itself up in a chrysalis and, after a bit of thought, emerge a fairylike butterfly?  Perhaps others, like me, had a chemistry set in elementary school years with a booklet of experiments designed less to teach scientific principles than to miraculously turn a clear liquid bright blue when a white powder was stirred in and then red with another additive.  I recall as well watching with the same quantum of amazement (though over a longer time span) an intensely green shoot venture out from the inside of a bean, then grow and curl and bask in  the sun and eventually make a hundred more beans. 

      Once these phenomena become routine, we manufacture new marvels woven wholly of imagination.  Stage magicians make theater of such wonder for children and adults alike as they produce silk handkerchiefs out of thin air or saw a person in two only to restore her a moment later with a flourish.  Similar spectacles accompany those we consider more or less holy whose miracles are to believers their surest bona fides.  (Their acts most safely remain well in the past to avoid the scrutiny that has marred the reputation of recent practitioners such as the late Sai Baba who liked to materialize wristwatches, coins, and ash for his devotees in a formula I suspect was dependent on their level of donations who in retrospect seems more an adept in prestidigitation than miracles.)

     Fictional metamorphoses like Apuleius’ Golden Ass or the Monkey King’s Journey to the West, at once amusing and profound, point toward spiritual enlightenment, while Ovid’s brilliantly retold tales of mythic changes is a virtual encyclopedia of permutations, but equally astonishing phenomena have shaped the world and continue to take place daily. 

     We smile when we read that Aristotle thought that oysters emerged from slime in a process of spontaneous generation, but, of course, life did at first appear from nonliving components.  The family tree of all plants and animals began about four billion years ago, though there remains a good deal of controversy about the details.  Surely the story the scientists tell is as weird, poetic, and profound as the versions in Genesis and Hesiod’s Theogony. 

     A miracle occurs daily as well when life fuels its survival with food, which is always organic.  Life lives exclusively on life, even for vegans.  What we eat is broken down until in the series of reactions called the Krebs cycle sugar is metabolized and becomes available as energy.  Inert matter is thereby brought to life and transformed into action, and the process is taking place right now.

     The most momentous transformation can only be the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, the starting point of everything.  As mysterious and mythic as creation by fiat, the physicists say the universe sprang into being where once was nothing, not even, it seems, time.  If this event seems remote and speculative, it is equaled countless times  in the present era by the quantum fluctuations that, even in a vacuum, generate virtual particles in pairs which, after arising out of nothing, almost instantly annihilate each other.  Whatever the physicists say, I would like to think that positive and negative charges in the cosmos,  matter and anti-matter as well, are precisely equal and thus combined add up to precisely nothing?  The universe is a void, sufficiently bored with its emptiness to play at pendulum swings between existence and non-existence.  It sounds like a science that Nargarjuna would have understood two millennia ago. 

     Though the fact is counter-intuitive, solidity is the illusion, flux the rule.  Matter never ceases transforming from one form to another.  People may feel uneasy about their bodies’ physical dissolution, but our present form is merely a moment in the dance of the elements, which briefly resulted in the formation of this particular sensitive burden of human flesh with the ability to contemplate itself.  Presto change o!  Our cells are constantly sloughing off and being replaced by fresh recruits. 

     In social life as well as biological, we are repeatedly rechristened in new roles.  During each stressful change we protect ourselves with ritual: birth, death, puberty, marriage, even the acquisition of academic degrees, every change requires the blessing of a ceremony.  One may try to cling to a handful of the river of time, but the water passes through our fingers and heads quietly downstream without recognizing our silly anxiety and we are carried too and know that in the end we all will arrive at the river’s mouth where we will rejoin the wine-dark seas.  No need to hustle; no need to hesitate. 

    We admire without ever attaining the enlightened views of Heraclitus who tells us that the cosmos “rests by changing” and that “all things are a-flowin” (though that latter phrase is not attributed to him until a thousand years after his death).  Had they not lived on opposite sides of the globe, the old Ephesian might have embraced Laozi whose sages contemplated the cosmos with neither illusion nor distress.

   

By attaining the height of abstraction we gain fullness of rest. 

All the ten thousand things arise, and I see them return.

Now they bloom in bloom but each one homeward returneth to its root.

Returning to the root means rest.

It signifies the return according to destiny.

Return according to destiny means the eternal.

Knowing the eternal means enlightenment.

 

 

 

 

The line from William James is part of his journal entry for April 30, 1870.  See The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott.

 

Heraclitus’ most famous aphorism first appeared in Simplicius’ commentary on Aristotle though Plato had put a very similar phrase in  his mouth in  the Cratylus.  The lines from Laozi are from poem 16 in the 1913 translation by D. T. Suzuki and Paul, Carus.