A Lesson from McGuffey

 

      When Noah Webster began teaching as a young man during the Revolutionary War, his students used the Bibles from their homes to practice reading.  Anticipating the nationalistic principles that were to underlie his dictionary, Webster wrote a series of "Blue-Backed Spellers," followed by grammars and readers that proved immensely popular for decades [1], superseded only by the publication of the McGuffey’s Readers in 1840 which were to sell even more copies, putting them “in the same category as the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary” [2].  In 1930 the first of editor Zerna Sharp’s readers featuring Dick, Jane, and Sally appeared, putting McGuffey’s in eclipse though the old texts have never gone out of print and continue to sell tens of thousands of copies a year, remaining popular among some homeschoolers [3].  A glance at McGuffey’s Sixth Eclectic Reader indicates cultural shifts of the last century and a half, most prominently a loss of focus on the subtleties of the spoken and the written word.

     While each textbook series became progressively less pious, received ideas were regularly promoted over critical thinking.  As textbooks are specifically designed to transmit ideas to a new generation, this is only natural.  Thus McGuffey included such patriotic selections as Joseph Rodman Drake’s “The American Flag” (“Majestic monarch of the cloud!”) [4] and Washington Irving’s encomium on Columbus which describes him as a great and pious “genius” possessing “magnanimity of spirit” who took a benevolent view of America’s indigenous people [5].  “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers” by F. W. P. Greenwood finds “not a single community of men to be compared with them, in the respect of deep religious impressions and an exact performance of moral duty” [6].  These words were doubtless studied in classrooms displaying American flags and portraits of a founding father or two. 

     On the topic of Native Americans, the reader includes an excerpt from a speech by Charles Sprague which declares that America’s aborigines have all “passed away,” Europeans having arrived “bearing the seeds of life and death.”  According to Sprague time has “blotted forever from [the American continent] a whole, peculiar people.”  “As a race, they have withered from the land,” he says, and “read their doom in the setting sun,”  With a sentimental tear, he reflects on a future when they will “be remembered “only in the songs and chronicles of their exterminators” [7].  

     Though the role of religion in education was already beginning its steady decline, McGuffey included a number of religious readings such as “God is Everywhere” by Joseph Hutton, an early nineteenth century poet [8] now obscure, and the Thirty-Seventh Psalm [9].  There are in addition a good many more vaguely spiritual readings, meant for students’ moral improvement.  Many selections required considerable historical background, such as Charles James Fox’s “A Political Pause,” an impassioned fragment from  a polemic about the war with France [10] or the exchange between Walpole and Pitt [11], included more as show-pieces of oratory than for the specific issues involved.

     The verbal sophistication of many literary selections, though, must be for a modern reader the most striking aspect of McGuffey’s book.  Eleven-year-olds were given great chunks of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Dryden, Thomson, and Cowper as well as American authors like Longfellow, Bryant, and Emerson without simplification or even the explanatory notes an undergraduate textbook would include today.  Children (and even teachers) may not have wholly understood everything they read, but they would certainly improve their reading skills with such challenging selections.  At any rate, all the texts in McGuffey’s are adult literature while in contrast, a survey of novels recommended for sixth graders by teachers’ groups and publishers today reveals that virtually all readings are now written specifically for children.  There are only a very few exceptions.  A Jack London story made one list, and many have highly regarded young adult titles, such as Anne Frank’s diary and works by Judy Blume and Scott O’Dell, but the editors seem to think that writers like Poe, Mark Twain, and de Maupassant would be too difficult or perhaps too irrelevant for today’s students. 

     Declamation, both speech-making and reading literary selections aloud, though virtually absent from today’s curricula, is a significant concern of McGuffey’s.  As a preparation for the readings, the first sixty pages of the book cover viva voce articulation, inflection, accent and emphasis.  Indeed the introductory notes mention “elocutionary value” as one of the standards by which readings were selected.  This is all but the last gasp of the ancient rhetorical rhetorician’s education set forth in Cicero, Quintilian, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium.  As late as the middle twentieth century, many college-bound students enhanced their resumés with Debate Club and Moot Court.  In my high school’s talent show during the early ‘sixties, one boy, a talented actor, thought it appropriate to recite Oliver Wendell Holmes’ comic “One-Hoss Shay,” for his schoolmates.  I doubt that many would consider such a performance today.

     In the nineteenth century the general population read poems aloud in their parlors as a form of home entertainment.  They also relished fine oratory from clergymen and politicians.  In addition they often purchased subscriptions to courses of evening lectures on a variety of topics.  The thrill our ancestors felt at hearing soaring rhetoric is today a specialized taste; more Americans are excited today by watching cars crash through windows in action movies than by verbal pyrotechnics.  Thus leaders’ statements on the news are soundbites rather than speeches and, when readers encounter high-flown language, they are more likely to lose the thread of discourse than to admire the author’s virtuosity.  The pedagogues of writing now stress clarity and brevity at the expense of beauty and emotional force.

     This abandonment of training in speaking or reading aloud marks a major change in the teaching of English.  The aesthetic and affective potential of artful writing is likely to be more prominent in the spoken word, but it has been discounted in favor of the mere delivery of information.  By ignoring writers of the past in favor of those that more directly reflect the lives of the students, educators have abandoned the opportunity to widen readers’ perspectives while incidentally developing their taste.  In a curious way, in verbal art, both spoken and written, thanks to McGuffey my Midwestern ancestors in their one-room schools may have been more sophisticated than today’s teen whose eyes rarely leave his phone.  Having taught English 101 a good many times, I can testify that many students reach college with abysmal verbal skills.  In today’s educational initiatives STEM subjects have an unquestioned lead.  Those who care about the English language might feel a bit nostalgic for the these quaint old readers.   

    

 

 

1.  The speller was published in 1783, a grammar 1784, and a reader in 1785).  The reader was to sell a hundred million copies.  See https://noahwebsterhouse.org/noahwebsterfactsheet/.

2.  These sold 120 million copies. See “William Holmes McGuffey and His Readers,” The Museum Gazette, National Park Service https://web.archive.org/web/20150420113537/https://www.nps.gov/jeff/learn/historyculture/upload/mcguffey.pdf.

3.  Whereas McGuffey’s had taught phonics, The Scott, Foresman Dick, Jane, and Sally books used whole word recognition. 

4.  P. 119.  The author died in 1820 at the age of twenty-fiove.  Antonín Dvořák thought enough of the poem to set it to music.

5.  P. 192.  To Irving he had as well “a poetical temperament,” though he was also “irascible and impetuous.”

6.  P. 223. 

7.  P. 209, from a speech delivered at Boston in observance of the Fourth of July, 1825 titled “The Character and Extirpation of the Indians of New England.”  Charles Ives thought highly enough of his words to set some to music in his 114 Songs.

8.  P. 161.  Hutton was a playwright as well.  The Psalm is on p. 189.

9. P. 67.  Apart from poetry Woodworth wrote operas, plays, hymns, and the first American historical novel The Champions of Freedom, or The Mysterious Chief, A Romance of the Nineteenth Century, Founded on the Events of the War, Between the United States and Great Britain, which Terminated in March, 1815 (1816).  His best-known work, though, is "The Old Oaken Bucket" (1817) which, set to music by George Kiallmark, became a popular song and was recorded in  1899.

10.  P. 102.  The headnote cautions that “his morals were not commendable.” 

11.  P. 151-152.

Frances Trollope: The Triumph of Snobbery

 

 

I used the 1949 Borzoi edition edited by Donald Smalley with excellent introduction, notes, and index.  How nice to see such a volume from a trade publisher!  Parenthetical notes provide page references to this edition, some of these providing the source for several successive quotations.  For the convenience of those with other editions, I append a list of the page numbers cited in parentheses matched to the chapters in which each quotation may be found.

 

     Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) fed British curiosity about the United States.  Her book sold well, ameliorating for a time her chronic financial straits.  She shared with her predecessor Capt. Basil Hall who had published Travels in North America in 1829 and her follower Capt. Frederick Marryat whose Diary in America appeared in 1839 a satirical view, mingling more or less informative descriptions with lampoons of American behavior calculated to flatter Old World readers.    

     Trollope deployed modesty tropes to deny her ambition to do anything beyond a journalistic recording what was before her eyes.  How could a lady like herself be expected to critique economics or even to write a professionally florid rhetoric?  Though this pose is faux naïf considering her constant wry irony and arch commentary, she did sketch recognizable features of American life which have little changed since her day. 

     She repeatedly stresses Americans’ obsession with money, noting how pursuit of wealth is the universal goal and the sole index of success.  She showily deplores this single-minded fascination with money which leads naturally to a philistine indifference to the arts.  She readily concedes American “activity and perseverance in all kinds of speculations, handicraft, and enterprise, which promise a profitable pecuniary result.”  An Englishman who had long lived in the United States tells her he never heard an American conversation which did not include the word “DOLLAR” (her capitalization).  “This sordid object,” she goes on, “must inevitably produce a sordid tone of mind,” which she proceeds to prove by examples Yankee sharp dealing.  (301)   

     A critic might note that much of the world is likewise chasing after prosperity, but for Mrs. Trollope life in the United States was next to unendurable, though she spent more than three years in this country.  According to her, much of the landscape was literally under a miasma, resulting in chronic “ague and fever.” (33)  Cincinnati in particular she found “far from healthy.” (84)  Walking in woodlands, she finds not beauty but “congeries of leaves that have been rotting since the flood” which “infect the air.” (42)  She describes small farmers as living in barbaric isolation like Polyphemus suffering material want and a total lack of social relations, all of which they accept gladly simply in order to avoid ever saying, “God save the king!” (49-50)  “Never,” she says, has she seen “human nature reduced so low.” (21)

     Whether rural Americans were in fact different from peasants in any part of the world is surely questionable.  However, Trollope did accurately identify two central contradictions at the base of this country: the treatment of native peoples and of Africans and their descendants.  She refers to Indian policy as “base, cruel, and most oppressive,” “treacherous and false almost beyond belief” (221) and denounces the “avarice and intemperance of the white men” in dealing with the aboriginal tribes. (330)

     On the issue of slavery, she had come to America considering this “peculiar institution,” as Calhoun called it,  “essentially wrong,” (186) a sentiment she shared with many of her fellow-countrymen since the United Kingdom had turned from being the greatest engine of the slave trade to its greatest opponent.  Treating people as chattel, she realized, “strikes painfully against every feeling of justice, mercy, or common humanity.” (246)  Anti-slavery motifs are prominent as well in her novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836).

     Yet her attitude toward the monstrous institution is ambivalent, consistently muted and often undercut by her own words.  She makes light of her own sentimental sympathy for the first slave she encounters, musing “How very childish does ignorance make us!  and how very ignorant we are upon almost every subject, when hear-say evidence is all we can get!” (9)  Presumably with little experience of the treatment of field workers, she declares that “the condition of domestic slaves . . . does not appear to be bad.” Their owners often give them “much kindly attention.”  Not only are they “tolerably well fed, and decently clothed,” “rarely exposed to the lash, and . . . carefully nursed in sickness,” they receive these benefits in spite of the fact that their mode of living “seems a matter of great indifference to them.” (245) 

     She praises the “sedulous attention” with which underlings look after her in slave states, (185) making a dramatic contrast her experience of free American hired help whom she finds impossible, “poor wretches” tormented as by “a sore, angry, and wakeful pride.”  She concluded that her servant was miserable because she had “heard a thousand and a thousand times that she was as good as any other lady, that all men were equal, and women, too.” (53-4)

     Thus the root of America’s problems is, for Trollope no mystery.  She traces all of the country’s ills, its deficiencies in the arts and education, its vulgarity, so repulsive to her finer sensibilities, to the democratic form of government.  In her view “common sense” revolts at the “mischievous sophistry,” that “false and futile axiom” “all men are created equal.”  For this fatal national foundation she blames Thomas Jefferson whom she rightly labels a hypocrite for his keeping slaves (and with them engendering children). (71)  His “hollow and unsound” doctrines “would make of mankind an unamalgamated mass of grating atoms.” (316)

     However, her political point is misleading.  In fact her fundamental criticism is less political than social and aesthetic, though the causes are mingled since for her Americans’ disagreeable manners arise from their ill-advised system of government. 

     In part of course Trollope’s attitudes are national ones, arising from British pride and suggesting the superiority often claimed for Europe over the young country, reinforced by British rivalries in the Revolution and the War of 1812.  Her argument for a stratified, even a semi-feudal, society is one that many, including some Americans, would have made in her era.  The issue of democratic reform was certainly much discussed in the United Kingdom. The Reform bill of 1832 had expanded the franchise by fifty percent, but, as a net worth of £10 remained a requirement, more than four-fifths of the male population still could not vote, and agitation continued, sometimes violently repressed.   Those favoring more progressive political ideas often looked across the Atlantic, while those defending the status quo found negative examples in the same place. 

     While hers may have seemed the voice of the ordinary respectable Briton, her own class status was more unstable than her readers probably suspected.  The daughter of a clergyman, she had been well-educated and made a middle-class marriage to a barrister, yet she was never wealthy, and, when her husband proved a failure both in his law practice and his attempts to farm some leased property, the family found themselves in serious financial straits.  More than once they were evicted, with sheriff’s agents dragging their belongings to the street.  Following the American sojourn, the Trollopes moved permanently to the Continent to escape debt collectors and imprisonment.

     Frances Trollope soon realized that she would be more likely than her husband to generate a decent income, and her residence in the United States was part of a scheme to launch a business on the Western frontier.  Though the shop did not last long, her book turned out to be her salvation, proving so popular that she was able to continue writing and in  fact to support herself with her pen, eventually publishing something like a hundred volumes and in her later years enjoying a prominent position among the English expatriates in Florence. 

     Frances Trollope, though, disclaimed political theory.  “I am in no way competent to judge the political institutions of America, and, if I should occasionally make an observation on their effects, as they meet my superficial glance, they will be made in the spirit, and with the feeling of a women, who is apt to tell what her first impressions may be, but unapt to reason back from effects to their causes.”  (47)  Nonetheless, she thought a tour of the United States would be enough to cure any English radical of sedition.  (44)

     With such decidedly anti-democratic attitudes, she seems an unlikely emigrant, but she arrived under the influence of Frances Wright and, less directly, Robert Owen, whose principles were nothing short of radical.  Her horror at the sight of the ramshackle Nashoba Commune (which she had referred to as Miss Wright’s “estate” [14]) arose not from Wright’s egalitarian ideals which entailed utopian socialism, free love, and rejection of Christianity, but the “desolation” (27) and lack of fresh food.  Apart from the expectation of making money by establishing a business on the Western frontier, she had liked the idea that her children could be educated at her friend’s school free of charge.  Though she ridicules Owen and others associated with the New Harmony Commune such as William Maclure and Mme. Fretageot (10) and found even her dear friend Frances Wright in the wilds of America to have nothing whatever in common with “the Miss Wright I had known and admired in London and Paris” (27), she seemed to feel no reservations about casting her lot with them. 

     If her class pride served her poorly in Nashoba where she rebelled against a diet of corn bread and rain water (28), it likewise proved her undoing in Cincinnati.   Without going into the details that biographers have recorded, it is sufficient here to say that she stumbled from one project to another, meaning to earn her living by her taste.  She became involved with the Western Museum, an institution that mixed natural history exhibits with side show attractions, becoming a key figure in designing one of its more popular exhibits, a room-size view of Hell populated by wax figures of the damned.  This show ran for twenty-five years, often the prime support of the Museum.  Another exhibit that appealed to the taste of the town was the “Invisible Girl,” voiced by her son Henry, posing as a spirit who would speak to paying visitors.  Located at the end of a spooky corridor, the “Invisible Girl” supported the Museum for decades. 

     Saying that Cincinnati needed a dome, Trollope invested her family’s limited resources in constructing on Third Street an exotic edifice which included Moorish and Egyptian decoration as well as a dome.  In a city where livestock ran in the streets, e she meant to establish a cultural center with a coffeehouse, an “elegant Saloon” for refreshments, a bar room, an exhibition gallery, and a ballroom, as well as a bazaar for upscale goods.  Perhaps she was not as sharp a trader as she describes Americans as being, but her entrepreneurial effort was unsuccessful, and the establishment closed.  She continued to try to make her artistic judgement marketable.  She staged musical and dramatic events, always thinking that she could be the missionary, bringing fashion and beauty to a benighted region.

     As with others clinging to gentility by their fingertips, for Trollope social forms became exceedingly important.  All she had was her education, her wit, her taste and refinement which she emphasizes at every opportunity.  To her democracy’s worst sin is its ugliness.  Her recoil from her crude surroundings is the sign of her superiority.  Ignoring the brutal lives of English workers at the time, she is horrified at their American cousins.  To her it is the “higher” human wants (45) which cannot be satisfied in the United States due to the people’s “lack of refinement.” (47).   It is civilized leisure that she looks for in vain.  “I never saw people who lived so much without amusement as the Cinncinatians”; it is a “triste little town,” (74) she says, deploying her French as evidence of her own cultivation.   She wonders encounters a German woman who laments, “They do not love music.  Oh no!  and they never amuse themselves, -- no, and their hearts are not warm . . .they have no ease.” (266)  She wonders how, in such a barbaric place, taste might ever be formed.  “How can a correct and polished style, even of speaking, be acquired?” (328)  Alas, she concludes Americans have certainly “not the same besoin of being amused.” (339)

     Her fundamental objections are matters of taste.  She attacks America for its want of “polish” (46) and “chivalry,” “the unbought grace of life.” (257)  Though an American can satisfy animal wants “profusely” and “at a very easy rate,” “there is no charm, no grace.”  “I very seldom during my whole stay in the country heard a sentence elegantly turned, and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American.”  (45) 

     With almost shocking ease, she looks past the monstrous historical inequities to conclude that the single most offensive aspect of American life is the men’s “incessant, remorseless” use of chewing tobacco.  (16)  To her the habitual use of this “loathsome herb” has literally deformed the faces of Americans’ lips, lending them a “remarkable peculiarity.” (234)  Adding to the Americans’ grotesque appearance is the sprawling posture in which they dispose themselves over chairs and other furniture, sitting in “the most unseemly attitudes” (226) even in settings where greater gentility might be expected such as the theater or even the Congress. 

     When her fellow passengers on a riverboat are not “gambling and wrangling,” (17) they eat dinner with a “total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured, the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter the mouth, and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth with a pocket knife.” (18-19)  She finds her  steamboat accommodations worse than “the apartment of a party of well conditioned pigs.” (16)

     Just as the problem with democracy in her view is not so much that it is unworkable or unjust as that it produces ugliness.  Similarly, she is horrified at fundamentalist religious practices, describing with horror, revivals, camp meetings, and prayer sessions in private homes.  She finds the religious enthusiasm he observes in America to be “frightful” (80) and “detestable” (81).  A service makes her “sick with horror” (172).  To her the guarantee of respectability offered by a national church more than compensates for any loss of freedom of conscience.  She simply finds American spirituality to be in poor taste.     

     For a good portion of her career Frances Trollope might have seemed a prisoner of her class identity, stubbornly looking for something in the United States that the country did not offer.  Everywhere she looked, the sights of the Western frontier disgusted her.  She was attracted to a life-style she could often not afford and, while ridiculing the taste of Cincinnatians who could not appreciate true works of art, she nonetheless curated shows of hokey magic and wax figures to try to turn a profit.  Yet her snobbery triumphed in the end.  It was specifically her distaste for the rough raw life she saw around her that made her Domestic Manners of the Americans a best-seller, and launched her on a very productive and sufficiently profitable writing career and landed her eventually where she had always wanted to be, in a fashionable set of her fellow-countrymen in the prestigious and highly artistic city of Florence. 

    

 

 

 

 

The following list identifies the chapter in which each of the cited page numbers is located in the Borzoi edition.

14 II

16 II

17 III

18-19 III

21 III

27 III

33 IV

42 IV

44 V

45 V

46 V

47 V

49-50 V

53-4 VI

71 VII

74 VIII

84 IX

186 XVII

221 XX

226 XX

234 XX

246 XXII

257 XXIII

266 XXV

301 XXVIII

316 XXIX

328 XXIX

330 XXIX

339 XXX

Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Anatomy of Melancholy

     The power of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s singing made him one of the most popular black artists of his day and has attracted a constant stream of admirers and covers in the century since. Jefferson’s “Dry Southern Blues” is a classic visionary statement of the blues, anatomizing the depression that might arise from life’s hardships, social inequity, and lack of love against a background of mortality and existential anxiety. Every sort of suffering -- physical, social, romantic, and spiritual -- is acknowledged, but the bluesman sings on with a resilience and equipoise born of suffering. The singer cannot find satisfaction. His eloquently formulated response to his own unease, while it does not resolve the contradictions of life, is, like all great art, nonetheless sufficiently redemptive, with its aesthetic mastery, its abstract play of musical form indicating a nobly tragic response to the intolerable conditions of life.
     The use of the word “dry” in the title is never justified (and thus limited) in the lyrics. Waves of association spread outward from this single term, among them hard times, a parched season, a useless well, an unsatisfying meal, a lack of alcohol, sex without passion, no sex at all. Connotation may spread far enough in the end to suggest the poet’s dry wit, his signifying indirection, his pose of artistic abstraction from his own woes.
     The opening words of the song locate its action in the subjective consciousness: “my mind leads me to take a trip down south.” Yet he finds no rural Eden. Even in reverie serenity escapes him. Though the Southern climate may be warmer, it may be “dry” as well, violently racist, for instance, or romantically unrewarding. Indeed, the assumption that the lover is seeking out his beloved on the way to a happy ending is deflated by the conclusion of the first verse. The speaker expects to call at “a fatmouth’s house.” The counterweight to love’s charms seems to be a companion who will not stop talking, one of the oldest negative stereotypes of women. Experience has taught the singer that the quest for joy is doomed to be frustrating.
     The second verse contains a painfully sharp image that expresses in epitome the tone of the whole.


One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
Well, the blue light's the blues, the red light's the worried mind


     Whereas in the similar image of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” the train is associated with a departing lover, here the signification is wholly psychological. The speaker is caught in an insoluble dilemma with both signals indicating depression, and the training pulling inexorably out of the station, associated with the phantom-like evanescence of every hope as the individual seeks to grasp and hold it. It is always “gone,” like the words “under erasure” in Derrida, gone far beyond as in the parasamgate! at the end of the Heart Sutra.
     This pain is then countered by stanza three’s recoiled redirection, warning “sugar” “t'ain't nobody there,” questioning thereby the possibility of love and in fact questioning all sense perception. The strophe ends more modestly, pulling back from the metaphysical cliff’s edge to the sociological with a cynical commentary on the South: “if a man stay here, he'll stay most anywhere.”
     Yet the nagging existential woe proves unshakeable. The speaker awakens dissatisfied, restless, and unstable, “rambling” while still in bed. The beloved recognizes the symptoms: "It's all the world-weary blues." What more can be said?
     The next two stanzas provide some historical context. Since the verse specifically refers to the draft which was active only in 1917 and 1918 (reinstated in 1940) the song must refer to that time. The reference to “women on the border” suggests the 1910-1919 US-Mexico Border Conflict, yet this background sheds little light on the meaning of the verses. While the perspective had been male earlier, it is now the woman’s worries that engage the singer. The American military stole the woman’s lover away just as a rival might have done. She mentions no concern about his danger in combat, but instead imagines him faithlessly carrying on with “them good-lookin' womens on the border” who, apparently an unruly bunch, are “raising sand” or causing disturbances. They are said, in fact, to be “drinkin' over the water trough,” emphasizing their bestial nature. She is anxious for the day he might be discharged, leave such temptations, and return home: “I wished Uncle Sam would hurry up and pay these soldiers off.”
     “Dry Southern Blues” concludes with four verses expounding the near-impossibility of untroubled love which has become a figure for all suffering in life. The poet approaches his frustration from every angle and finds it equally intractable. Just as the railway lights had allowed no way out of his depression, he now says “I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea,” leaving him without caffeine, but more generally indicating the inability of male and female to get along.
     He fears “my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me.” A “hoodoo,” of course may explain any misfortune and the power of sexual desire has to many felt like a magic spell. Though the phrase “sweet mama” lengthened and sensuously deepened as “soul sweet mama,” promises pleasure, the speaker fears the loss of will of one possessed. Sexual failures are even more likely than successes to be attributed to magic intervention.
     When the beloved confesses that she does not love the singer, in fact does not even “know how,” he “commentates” (the elongated formality of the word similar to blues usage of “declare” or “signify”) with a paradoxical affirmative: "Yes, I love you sky high." Their feelings are always at cross purposes, it seems, one way or another.
     Even the physical encounter is fraught with tension. By itself the line “she had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear,” is part of the description of women as animals dating back to Semonides. The compound sounds rather like a monster. While monkeys are considered wild, dirty, and lusty, a teddy bear (as we know from Elvis) is adorable. But a punch line remains. The rhyme line notes that that cute head comes with “a mouth full of lip,” linking back to the “fatmouth” of the first stanza. This verbal aggression overcomes the singer and dominates his world. There is no escaping. “I guarantees it's everywhere.”
     In the final stanza the focus moves back to consider the entire globe. It seems as though the singer is boasting of his success as a lover with a girl in every port until he mentions the one realistic woman, “a brownie yonder in Dallas.” Of this one, whom he might in fact visit or court, he says, “I'm afraid to call her name.” Thus the song must end as the singer is reluctant even to speak of this woman. Ambivalence and contradiction have tightened to silence.






Blind Lemon Jefferson – Dry Southern Blues

My mind leads me to take a trip down south
My mind leads me to take a trip down south
Take a trip down south and stop at a fatmouth's house

One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
Well, the blue light's the blues, the red light's the worried mind

I hate to tell you, sugar, it t'ain't nobody there
I hate to tell you, sugar, it t'ain't nobody there
If a man stay here, he'll stay most anywhere

I got up this mornin', ramblin' for my shoes
I got up this mornin', ramblin' for my shoes
The little woman said to me, "It's all the world-weary blues"

Uncle Sam was no woman, but didn't he draft your man?
Uncle Sam was no woman, but didn't he draft your man?
Tell me them good-lookin' womens on the border's raisin' sand.

Well, women on the border's drinkin' over the water trough
Well, women on the border's drinkin' over the water trough
I wished Uncle Sam would hurry up and pay these soldiers off

I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I believe to my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me

I asked the girl did she love me, said, "Lemon, I don't know how"
I asked the girl did she love me, said, "Lemon, I don't know how"
Caught me commentatin', "Yes, I love you sky high"

She had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear
She had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear
And a mouth full of lip, I guarantees it's everywhere.

I've got a girl in Cuba, I've got a girl in Spain
I've got a girl in Cuba, I've got a girl in Spain
I've got a brownie yonder in Dallas, I'm afraid to call her name

Hitchhiking

     I recall with considerable nostalgia the feeling of free-floating liberation while standing by the side of the road hitchhiking, studying perhaps for a considerable time the rocks at one’s feet, the café across the street, and the householder emerging from her door every five minutes or so, waiting for someone to arrive or just keeping tabs on me. Somehow, casting oneself to the mercy of chance, pretending for the moment to need nothing at all except the lift which cannot fail to carry the rider to the next experience.
     The decline of hitchhiking in the last fifty years surely signals a more general loss of cooperative spirit and a corresponding increase in suspicion and fear. Whereas people had once shared their vehicles in return for a social encounter, a chance at conversation, a chance to do a good turn to a stranger, they now think only of the chance of crime. I acknowledge that this possibility does exist, that either driver or rider might pose a potential threat to the other. Indeed I know someone who was killed while camping by the road alongside a man to whom he had given a ride. Yet prudence need not always mandate behavior.
     In my youth hitchhiking was commonplace. At key intersections there might be several travelers at once thumbing rides. Sometimes a handy telephone pole carried the comments of those awaiting a ride. College students and servicemen outnumbered drifters, I think, most of the time, but everyone moved on in the end, even the couples, even those with dogs. In the opening scene of Morris’s utopian News from Nowhere, a pleasant ferryman, brother to all, offers the narrator a ride, not for a fee, but freely in a spirit of loving cooperation. In the same way some years ago, “back in the day,” to use today’s idiom, a driver, incurring no loss and possibly gaining worthwhile conversation as well as a performing a mitzva, simply pulled over and inquired, “Where are you headed?” There is an entire visionary possibility implied in that gesture.
     I hitchhiked to college, though my parents sensibly offered to drive me to the train. Later I made what was called “autostop” in Europe and Africa where hitchhiking enjoyed a vogue sufficient to inspire pop songs by Karin Stenek in Poland, Anna Vissi and the Epikouri in Greece, and Patty Pravo in Italy, among many others. When I lived in San Francisco, owning no car, I set off on camping trips with my wife and daughter by thumb, and for years kept a permanent sign saying Berkeley on one side and S.F. on the other.
     I recall only one time that I really regretted accepting a ride. On our way to the Copper Canyon in northern Mexico, my wife, my daughter, and I enjoyed a day on a beach just outside of Guaymas. It was a place of marvels with shallow and calm water extending for several hundred feet, clear as glass, with plenty of fish and sea stars and other life. When we were ready to return to our hotel in town, we were gratified when a friendly car with several teenaged boys stopped almost immediately. It was not until we had seated ourselves, with a bit of crowding, that I noticed the youths were passing pints of tequila. I declined. The driver accelerated to an alarming speed. Fortunately, the distance was short and the danger soon past.
     I did, however, like all hitchhikers, meet many people of sorts I would have been otherwise unlikely to encounter. As a suburban kid, for me even encounters with friendly truck drivers, who might buy a stranger a cup of coffee, were novel, but some of the people I met were a bit more unsettling. More than once, gay men made a play for me. I recall one suited man in a huge car with sample cases in the back seat saying to me with a tired smile, “I’m a screw salesman, you see.” No one in my experience was any ruder than that.
     I did run into some nasty political sentiments, though. I once got a lift from a German immigrant who explained to me that Hitler was in fact a benevolent and heroic leader who had perhaps gone too far in his chastising of the Jews. It was only twenty years after the war, and I had never heard anyone speak favorably about Nazism. In southern Illinois a driver correctly pegged me as a college student and began playing redneck, baiting me with racist comments. He told me that a local drugstore still sold postcards of a lynching that had happened long ago, and his tone implied that those were the good old days. It was an occasion to keep one’s mouth shut.
     The joy I recall, though, was far simpler than meeting cranks and characters. Exhilaration arose from simply standing on the road’s shoulder, drifting with the river of time, for the moment like a mendicant monk, willing to accept whatever happened while wandering. Whatever the weather, whatever one’s luck, this sensation was unfailing.
     Hitchhiking had begun early in the history of automobiles when ownership of a motorcar was rare. Vachel Lindsay describes hitching in his 1914 Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. Surely the peripatetic jobseekers of the Depression vastly multiplied the number of people on the road, pushing the practice toward acceptability, and the servicemen seeking free transport during the war made giving rides patriotic. The heyday of the custom may well have been the late forties and early fifties, when On the Road made hitching hip and attracted travelers who perhaps could afford other modes of transportation but who preferred the romance and adventure of thumbing.
     By then, however, the nations’ interstate highway system was developing, and along with it the tendency of police authorities to frown on hitchhikers. From forbidding walking along the divided roadway, to bans on standing on entrance ramps, to a crackdown on hitchhiking anywhere, police who had always cast a dim eye on transients had an excuse to hassle people, searching them for dope and the like.
     This judicial suppression coincided with an increase in paranoia and a greatly increased suspicion of strangers, leading many to fear that hitchhiking must be associated with crime. In fact, though, this notion is simply untrue. The most comprehensive study of the question done during a period when hitchhiking was still common (the California Highway Patrol’s 1974 California Crimes and Accidents Associated with Hitchhiking) concluded “the results of this study do not show that hitchhikers are over represented in crimes or accidents beyond their numbers.” Prejudiced notions care little for evidence.
     Not only were hitchhikers subject to harassment from police; they also found far fewer people willing to give them a lift. In addition, car ownership had become almost universal, even among the poorer strata of American society, so those driven to hitching by necessity were not only small in number; they were also more likely to be oddballs or drunks or simply smelly.
     The Wobblies’ preamble states that they mean to form “the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” They felt they had a fix on what society should be like and they tried to make effective actions along that trajectory even while living under a predatory system that rewards only greed. In the sixties many felt that they, too, had glimpses of how to build an alternative arrangement based on cooperation and, dare I say, love, and they sought to realize these ideals with free stores, cooperative nursery schools, and food clubs, as well as political organizing in the era during which the Living Theatre raised the slogan “Paradise Now!” And hitchhiking surely has a place in paradise. The decay of hitchhiking is a symptom of the fragmentation of the human family. Our species, which gained its evolutionary advantage through cooperation, has unfortunately narrowed its sympathies, and we, are in my opinion, the poorer for it.

Polka

     I just heard an eighteen-time Grammy winner perform. Despite his immense popularity, due to the structures of American cultural life, it is very unlikely that the reader of this essay would recognize his name: Jimmy Sturr. His band plays polka music, which, until recently enjoyed its own Grammy category (doubtless reflecting significant sales). Polka has now been folded in to ethnic music (reflecting a decline), so he must compete with African and Indian musicians.  Lamentable or inevitable, the fact is that the number of polka fans who read (literary) poetry is as small as that of litterateurs who listen (and dance) to music like Sturr’s. The cultural divide is not imaginary.       When I was a young lad, newly interested in classical music, and asked if I might resume piano lessons, my Czech Uncle Bill told me a bit confidentially, as though he were letting me know my fly was open, that “Girls study piano, Bill. If you really want to play music, it would be just fine if you took up accordion.” It was, of course, of polkas that he was thinking.
     A consumer of a broad variety of music from Tibetan to African pop, I eventually (through Jimmy Rodgers and the Carter family) gained some appreciation for country music, but polkas continued to strike me as mindless and shallow in spite of polka-based works by Smetana, Strauss, and even Stravinsky
     Unlike such genres as blues and country music, which engage issues like alcohol with gravity as well as relish, to the polka dancer the barrel of beer is an unambiguous blessing: “Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun.” Of this world the same song testifies, “Only happy faces bloom there/ And there's never any room there/ For a worry or a gloom there.” At Sturr’s concert, his aides redefined red plastic beer cups as fetish objects, distributing them before singing a paean to “my red Solo cup.”
     In spite of the alcohol, in this happy land, there is no infidelity. Love songs do exist, but unlike most of the world’s poetry on the theme, love in Polkaland is as uncomplicated and enthusiastic as everything else. Radio shows featuring the genre are always sending out fortieth and fiftieth anniversary greetings to listeners to whom the very notion of an affair would be unmentionable (though not in every case undoable). Likewise, polka fans tend to be religious and patriotic to a fault.
     All received ideas are not only welcome; they are celebrated with manic intensity. Doubtless reassuring to an audience uneasy with modern uncertainties, the constant fast tempos allow no second thoughts. The wall of sound from the horn section is insistent, uncompromising. Indeed, the dancers at Sturr’s appearance appeared without delay, charmed by that powerful sound. They began hop-stepping rapidly about the floor, doing the half-step from which some would trace the name of the dance. Virtually all of retirement age, they skipped about the floor and were always ready to go again when the next number started up. It was as though I stood in the middle of the abandon of a festive Breughel scene. Where else could the energy and devotion to each other of these happy couples find expression?
     These polka people need not be Polish or Czech. Sturr sings in no Slavic tongue, and he is liable to stray from polka proper into country and popular material that shares its infectious, almost mindless beat and ideological conservatism. One recognized genre of American polka music is in fact the Native American Papago-Pima “chicken scratch” music. The urban factory worker and the small farmer may share with the native American a sense that the world is passing them by, that they have little control over the terms of their daily life, and that, as a result, the best strategy is to make one’s way doggedly through the week determined to have a good time on Saturday night. Once the band strikes up a tune, the greatest social problem is who stole the kischka.
     Sturr works the crowd infecting others with his wild exuberance. Yet he is a celebrity with whom the audience feels a connection. He steps among them, shaking hands and greeting people. He mentions many individuals known to the local crowd. Small and slim, with styled hair, he calls for “hallelujahs” from his people as though he were at a Pentecostal meeting (and, indeed, the last half century has seen a good many polka masses).
     They certainly have no need of the approbation of the aging half-Czech critic who cannot do the dance, but only stands by the sidelines, albeit with one foot tapping.

The American Supermarket

     One of the ways in which American culture is conquering the world is the spread of the supermarket through Europe and the developing world, displacing the open air stalls, the bakeries and butcher shops that had distributed foodstuffs for millennia. There is surely much to regret in this change, and I recognize the evils or agribusiness: the development of patented seeds, the cultivation of produce for endurance and appearance rather than flavor, the energy wasted to transport produce halfway round the world, the peculiar American commitment to corn, and I am not even touching the trend toward marketing prepared foods, uniformly more expensive though of lower aesthetic and nutritional value.
     Still, entering an American supermarket, who can fail to be seduced by the array of possibilities, the richness of choice, the ease of obtaining an immense variety of foodstuffs so conveniently available? What a paradisiacal vision the meat counter would have seemed to the generations of semi-starving ancestors! Who could avoid shopping for images with Ginsberg? Or fail to say grace with Howard Nemerov?
     I can walk those arid aisles with toiletries and cleaning supplies, cellophane tape and Tums, past all the pre-made meals and those just half pre-made. The rewards are great, who would complain when one can glimpse a sudden bell pepper from Holland like a model with absolutely flawless yellow skin! The Israeli oranges, extravagant in peel but so fragrant and almost too full of themselves! Kohlrabi that look as though they should have been grown underwater! Kale asserting a darkly serious vegetable strength, the conundrum of a whole coconut, fine apples made to fit the hand and in a dozen varieties, the fruit Athenaeus called a gift from Dionysos! What glories, too, of grains and seeds, a good share of what people have found toothsome these last few thousand years.
     Then, too, there is the meat, that “the bloody/Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,” according to Nemerov, who proceeds to thanks the Lord for having “conferred aesthetic distance/ Upon our appetites.” All those once-hot tissues now a cool wall, silent, awaiting preparation, latent with promise for our own needy flesh. Can we discern the ways of cattle, swine, sheep, and fowl from these clues they have left behind? Can we put on their virtue when we dine? Aware that my body would be consumed by beasts of a dozen phyla were it lying in the woods, knowing that those ancient Near Eastern reliefs of a predatory lion on its agonized prey represent life itself which can live only upon life, I have never quite understood moral vegetarianism. Of course, reason may have less to do with the issue than the memory of an odor such as the one that caused M. Loisel to exclaim “Ah! le bon pot-au-feu! je ne sais rien de meilleur que cela!” or perhaps a great joint of pork that has infused the house after cooking for half a day.
     We pay, of course, for the grand panoply of possibilities in the supermarket through the homogenization of the local and seasonal resources, and we receive something rather different from the tables of previous centuries. We may practice virtually any cuisine, but, for that reason, possess none of our own.
     It is really rather similar in the marketplace of beauty and thought. Just as the modern cosmopolitan mind can no longer see one mythology alone, and thus has little choice but to exchange the believer’s depth and simple certainty for breadth and an embarrassment of possibilities. Knowing the whole crew -- Zeus and Thor and Kwan Yin and Christ – it is as impossible to privilege one alone as it would be to commit to a lifetime of Oaxacan food, tasty though that may be. If I can listen to Indian ragas as well as Bach fugues, I am likely to hear neither with the ear of the specialist, but to hear both at all is no small thing. The Tibetan Buddhist monks seem to have the highest of times in their theological disputations, laughing and back-slapping and posturing grotesquely, but I am afraid one would have to leave Plato, Aquinas, and Spinoza forever behind in order to join them. We who find ourselves in the belated twenty-first century have little choice but to range about omnivorously, unsure whether it be a pleasure or a curse.
     In the USA today, we can only make the most of our wide range and excel as comparatists whether we would have chosen to be or not. If my chapattis are no match for those of a Delhi-wallah, and my baguette cedes to the ordinary Parisian boulangerie, I can at least revel in the range of possibilities available at the supermarket and on my bookshelves.