Radicalism in Form and Content in Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel

 

 

     The three novels of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy on my shelves had not been opened in decades, but I was not the only reader neglecting their author.  As far back as 1961 critic John Wrenn opened his biography of Dos Passos by asking “What’s happened to John Dos Passos?” [1]  Many are now unfamiliar with the writer whom Sartre lauded as “the greatest writer of our time” and the work that Edmund Wilson said “may well turn out to be the most important that has yet been produced by any American of Dos Passos’ generation” [2].  A novel which was named to the Modern Library’s list of the one hundred most important novels of the twentieth century has for many little more than historical interest.

     Whatever his own merits, Dos Passos’ reputation may have suffered from a double-edged extra-literary handicap.  He was most certainly a leftist writer of the ‘thirties, though some critics strive to play down his political engagement [3].  Oddly, though vulgar Marxist criticism abounds today under a variety of methodological names and artists are held to a politically defined standard of behavior even in their personal lives, the proletarian novels of the Depression are at a discount in the literary marketplace, due in part to the tendency toward reductive simplistic portrayals by some leftist fiction writers.  Today’s taste is likely to reflect a counterbalancing preference for experimental avant-garde techniques such as those very different strategies employed by, say, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Merrill.  A reader with a taste for elegant obscurity is unlikely to tolerate tales of put-upon workers. 

     Furthermore, Dos Passos’ innovations which so impressed early readers of the U. S. A. trilogy strike the twenty-first century reader as shallow.  To Alfred Kazin, who wrote the introduction  to my 1969 Signet classic edition, he was alone among his cohort in his exploitation of “radical technique, the language of Joyce, and ‘the religion of the word’” [3].  According to Kazin Dos Passos confronted the nastiness of modern capitalism not with social protest but with art.  His energy arises not from social protest and the hopes for a better world but from an aesthete’s Lost Generation “disenchantment” and a resulting retreat into aestheticism.  Similarly, he was primarily to Wrenn the creator of “brilliant technical innovations” [4].

     A contemporary reader may find it strange to see Dos Passos classed with Joyce as an experimenter.  It is true that The 42^nd Parallel is not a linear narration; it is, rather five people’s stories provided a chapter at a time, interspersed with brief biographies of culturally significant figures such as Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and Thomas Edison, and two other sorts of passages.  The first of these, “The Camera’s Eye,”  probably the basis for Kazin’s mentioning Joyce, contains autobiographical sketches done in a very loose stream-of-consciousness (all in lower case to emphasize the self-consciously experimental character of the writing).  The second, “Newsreel,” contains fragments from the Chicago Tribune interspersed with popular song lyrics and other materials, reminiscent of techniques in Eliot’s “The Wasteland” or Pound’s Cantos. 

     The principal characters are defined in terms reflecting economic class.  Thus Mac is a lumpenproletarian Wobbly with the interests of the entire working class in mind while J. Ward Moorehouse is a public relations consultant seeking only his own enrichment.  Likewise, most of the featured historical figures are politically significant: on the one hand there are two socialists (Eugene Debs under the title “The Lover of Mankind” and Big Bill Haywood) and two representatives of Progressive formations (William Jennings Bryan and Robert LaFollette).  Balancing these Americans who sought to benefit the masses are profiteers like the notoriously anti-union Andrew Carnegie and pioneer imperialist in Mesoamerica Minor Keith [5]. 

     While this arrangement of the text into four kinds of writing would ideally coalesce into a unified vision by the novel’s end, the memoirs (“The Camera’s Eye”) have very little relation to the main narratives and the “Newsreel” sections often seem even more tenuously linked to any governing pattern that would lend each fragment significance.  They sometimes approach incoherence in themselves.  Following the headlines “PLUMBER HAS HUNDRED LOVES” and “BRINGS MONKEYS HOME,” for instance, one reads “missing rector located losses in U. S. crop report let baby go naked if you want it to be healthy if this mystery is ever solved you will find a woman at the bottom of it said Patrolman E. B. Garfinkle events leading up to the present war run continuously back to the French Revolution.”  The verbal sequence scarcely seems to hang together. 

     The most consistent themes are clearly the injustice of capitalism and the appeal of the socialist alternative.  The reader might well regard Dos Passos as engagé.  He supported Sacco and Vanzetti and was active in the First American Writers Congress of 1935 which had been organized by the Communist Party-dominated League of American Writers.  His visits to first the Soviet Union and then later to Spain did sour him on Stalin’s Comintern, and though he then lived long enough to support Joseph McCarthy, Nixon, and Goldwater, there can be doubt about his active support for a revolutionary alternative in his youth. 

     Critics had, at least since Hauptmann’s The Weavers, questioned whether an entire class or nation can be a satisfactory narrative subject.  Balzac had sought to present an encyclopedic panorama of French society in his Comédie humaine, but his canvas was sufficiently large to allow an accumulation of complex and individualized portraits, while Dos Passos’ characters remain shallow, with neither any single portrait nor the group substantial enough to support novelistic length.  There is little structural patterning in the design of The 42^nd Parallel and indeed in the trilogy as a whole, little in the way of governing image systems or productive ambiguities.  Once Dos Passos’ formula is determined, its completion is largely a matter of filling in the blanks.  Such matters of aesthetic evaluation are not subject to positive proof; at best they accurately convey subjective impressions, but they are quite real in the reading experience and can be decisive in determining a book’s worth.

     The widespread opinion among critics that the quality of Dos Passos’ fiction declined after the U. S. A. trilogy is surely justified, but perhaps the author’s chef d’oeuvre itself may have been overvalued due to its once-fashionable combination of progressive politics and avant-garde literary technique (particularly when the technique is considerably more digestible than, say, Finnegan’s Wake).  Dos Passos deserves, without a doubt, a place among those writers of his era who took to depicting the lives of ordinary Americans.  Following the nineteenth century local color writers like Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett and the next generation such as Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters, an efflorescence of leftwing authors, many with Midwestern associations, succeeded.  Nelson Algren is quite correct when he said in 1951  “there has hardly been an American writer of stature who has not come up through the Chicago Palatinate.” [6]  Among the authors he may have had in  mind are Frank Norris 1870-1902, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Floyd Dell, Jack Conroy, James Farrell, and Richard Wright.  While Dos Passos may no longer be considered an artistic genius, as some had thought when U. S. A. was first published, he has a secure place in an important lineage.  The 42^nd Parallel remains worth reading, though I am not motivated to reread its two companion volumes which seem to provide only more quantity of the same content. 

 

  

1.  John Dos Passos, p. 2.

2.  See Sartre’s "John Dos Passos and 1919," reprinted in Literary and Philosophical Essays (1955), translated by Annette Michelson, p. 103 and Wilson’s “Dahlberg, Dos Passos and Wilson,” The Shores of Light, p. 449. 

3.  Alfred Kazin, for instance, in his introduction to the Mentor paperback goes to lengths to defend Dos Passos against the charge of social conscience, saying that he is erroneously assumed to be a “left-wing novelist,” whereas he has in fact always been “detached from all group thinking.”

4.  The 42^nd Parallel, vi.

5.  John Dos Passos, p. 8. 

6.  Three innovators are also included: Thomas Edison, August Steinmetz, and Luther Burbank who might be taken to simply signify technical progress. 

7.  In Chicago: City on the Make, p. 11.  “There has hardly been an American writer of stature who has not come up through the Chicago Palatinate.”  Surely thinking of Frank Norris 1870-1902, Upton Sinclair 1878-1968, Theodore Dreiser 1879-1945, Floyd Dell 1887-1968, Jack Conroy 1899-1990, James Farrell 1904-1979, Richard Wright 1908-1960.  At the same time a cohort of leftist writers, mostly Jewish, such Michael Gold, Max Eastman, and Josephine Herbst, were active in New York City.

Artists and Eccentricity

 

    In our day people associate artistic ability with eccentricity.  Research has indicated that people value art more highly if they are told the creator is unconventional in behavior {1].  Yet the association may not be unfounded.  According to another recent study truly creative people are indeed more likely to flout social expectations [2].  Yet this idea is far from universal.  In many cultures such as Heian Japan and Renaissance England poetry has been among the accomplishments expected of courtiers at the center of power.  For Pope, the poet, far from being a transgressive personality, is a skilled technician capable of eloquently expressing normative sentiments: “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” [3]. 

     The fact is that, though contradictory, both notions are valid, indeed complementary.  Just as every work of art reflects lived experience with a twist, never exactly duplicating it, and every phrase rests to some extent upon remembered language, every work in part affirms consumers’ expectations and in part twists or disappoints them.  In this way art transmits accumulated cultural data to every new generation yet avoids stagnating, always potentially admitting new data.  Folk, mass, and popular art are all more likely to tend toward the side of the continuum that confirms received ideas, while avant-garde art, including much contemporary work, is by definition more unpredictable. 

     Each tendency in fact has an archaic lineage, the first from shamans inspired by ecstatic experiences and the second from ritual priests capable of performing rites according to tradition.  The shaman’s vocation is by definition idiosyncratic, though his role is wholly traditional.  The distinguishing characteristic of his practice is a journey alone into spiritual realms inaccessible to others, often with the aid of those psychoactive substances called entheogens by their advocates [4].  Eliade’s classic study says that shamans are generally considered likely to display “aberrant psychic behavior patterns” if not outright “mental disease,” though he demurs in  part from this judgement, preferring to say simply that “they are separated from the rest of the community by the intensity of their own religious experience, "and that that break from the group begins the practitioner’s “true life” [5].

     On the other hand, priests are, even in pro-literate cultures, fundamentally learned men who are educated in the proper performance of ritual duties such as sacrifice.  In ancient Jewish, Hindu, and Classical Greek and Roman culture, the role of the priest is essential if one wishes one’s ceremonies to be efficacious.  His job, like that of a Roman Catholic priest administering sacraments, is in no way dependent on his individual spiritual character but rather on his knowing the prescribed procedures and the correct magic formulae.  Whereas the shaman may go into trance and otherwise act in extravagant or mysterious ways, the priest probably will present as a sober and respectable individual.  This function is as prevalent in oral cultures as in those with writing.  Thus an African anthropologist notes that only priests can offer “major sacrifices” and reliably transmit tribal lore.  According to an observer long resident among the Tiv of Nigeria, their priests were “grave” and “dignified” men [6].

     The same division is apparent in urbanized societies.  According to Plato, “just as they [Korybantian revelers] do not dance while in their right mind, thus the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they compose heir beautiful melodies” [7].  Yet the very fact that such celebrants were collectively enacting a social ritual indicates their normative role.  Moralizing poets like Theognis and the composers of Doric choral poems reinforced values shared by their community, while monodists might  express more idiosyncratic attitudes.  Thus Tyrtaios regularly praised valor in war, whereas Arkhílokhos expressed a more individualistic sentiment, and in  the nineteenth century Rimbaud’s transgression may be measured against the regularities of Claudel. 

     Genres may cluster toward one end or another of this spectrum.  Popular, folk, and mass literature all tend to reinforce pre-existing ideas, while experimental and avant-garde texts will overturn them.  A good deal of extremely sentimental, patriotic, and pious material is churned out to strengthen the status quo, while works more radical in form are likely to be cast in novel forms as well as are works of art brut.  One might contrast even within a single author’s oeuvre Christopher Smart’s craftsmanlike and orthodox Song to David with his unpredictable and verbally pyrotechnic Jubilate Agno.  In the twentieth century,  T. S. Eliot also illustrates both sides of the polarity, with his early poetry free and fragmented in form, disillusioned in vision, and quite novel in style and his later work in regular cadences as well as exemplifying his self-consciously reactionary formula (in “For Lancelot Andrewes”) "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion.” 

     Earlier literature had been largely sponsored by either the court or the church, guaranteeing a more or less conventional ideology and well as stimulating fulsome dedications in the hope of patronage, the equivalent of what would today be a grant or a commission.  With the coming of capitalism and the spread of literacy accompanying an increase in the middle class, not only the authors of best-sellers, but also such accomplished writers as Dickens and Mark Twain sought middle-brow audiences while others like Baudelaire and Stephen Crane scorned the bourgeoisie, creating counter-cultural or otherwise elitist bohemias.  Today a career as any sort of artist (the case is particularly obvious for poets) is so marginal that one may be considered a bit eccentric even to consider such an impractical ambition. 

     This dialectic has been obscured by the principle critical tradition (including Plato, Sidney, Puttenham, and Matthew Arnold) which has, often defending art against those to whom it seemed frivolous and moral, always maintained that the poet’s task is to define and reinforce his society’s ethical rules.  This millennia-long public relations campaign has obscured the extent to which certain writers, and portions of the work of others, have criticized or flouted accepted norms.  Ben Shahn notes that many people who would be glad to have a Van Gogh on their wall would be discomfited to find Van Gogh himself in their living room [8]. 

     The indices of aesthetic and social conformity often coincide, though they need not.  One can imagine, of course, an individual of thoroughly irregular life who nonetheless writes in quite regular meters or, on the other hand, a pillar of bourgeois respectability whose work is wholly experimental.  Most works and most artists will prove somewhat elusive, occupy shifting yet meaningful positions in the spectrum of possibilities.  Identification neither as traditionalist nor radical indicates value.  Bohemianism associated with high spirits and extravagance in one person may manifest as cruelty and self-destruction in another.  Likewise, of a hundred new expressive novelties only a few will suggest fruitful avenues for continued work. (the percentage may be similar for scientific researcher proposing hypotheses in a laboratory.)

     Still, locating an author or a poem along the continuum of conventionality yields information about the theme and about the place of a given text in  the society of its day.  Surely Villon’s life among thieves influenced his innovations far beyond his use of underworld slang and Allen Ginsberg’s enthusiasm for flamboyant transgression was of a piece with the originality of Howl.  On the other hand the decorum of John Milton and Alfred, Lord Tennyson is consistent with their influential roles as Cromwell’s Latin Secretary and as Poet Laureate. 

     So the historic association between artists and eccentricity is neither baseless nor universal.  The two are articulated in a way meaningful for the expression of theme and style and indicative as well of the place of the arts in a given context.  The beards and berets that signify an artist in Bushmiller’s Nancy comic strip may be in part a silly Philistine invention, but such symbols are also indicators of a genuine social tendency.  Art is aways simultaneously conforming and nonconforming to the expectations of those who receive it.  It confirms and also challenges preconceived ideas, and, depending on which end of the spectrum of predictability a given work occupies, the artist may seem a pillar of the establishment or a revolutionary.

 

 

1.  Wijnand Adriaan Peter Van Tilburg and Eric Raymond Igou, “From Van Gogh to Lady Gaga: Artist eccentricity increases perceived artistic skill and art appreciation” in the European Journal of Social Psychology vol. 44 no. 2.

2.  Shelley Carson, “The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People Are Eccentric,” Scientific American, May 1, 2011.

3.  Essay on Criticism, 97.

4.  The term was introduced in 1976 by a group of ethnobotanists including Jonathan Ott and R. Gordon Wasson.

5.  Mircea Eliade, Shamanism : archaic techniques of ecstasy.  See pages xi , 8, and 13. 

6.  According to Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (pen name of Laura Bohannon).

7.  Ion.  534a. οὐκ ἔμφρονες ὄντες ὀρχοῦνται, οὕτω καὶ οἱ μελοποιοὶ οὐκ ἔμφρονες ὄντες τὰ καλὰ μέλη ταῦτα ποιοῦσιν.

8.  In “On Nonconformity.”

Hip Aesthetics

 

     During the twentieth century, several forms of ironic reception of art gained widespread popularity.  Though far from novel, they benefited from the erosion of generally accepted standards of beauty and the exile of many artworks to subcultures or elite audiences.  “Kitsch”  and “camp” have been widely studied [1], while another approach, of arguably equal importance – the hip – has been neglected.  Each involved adopting, temporarily at least, often as much for the fun of it as to reveal unsuspected value, a taste either not one’s own or, at any rate, comically exaggerated.  For kitsch is fundamentally the appreciation of the extremely vulgar products of mass culture, while for camp it is a caricature of a flamboyant gay style.  The hip celebrates a spirited counter-cultural reaction, often the contrary of social norms. 

     The category is used both for artworks and for lived experience bordering on art.  For instance Blake was hip to find Satan the hero of Paradise Lost as was Abbie Hoffman in honoring George Metesky, the “mad bomber.”  Each reaction is an ironic reversal of what might be expected.  People ordinarily seek fame; it was hip of Ted Joans to avoid it.  People seek affluence; to live self-sufficiently was a hip choice by Scott Nearing.  Critics think highly of literary craftsmanship, so Kerouac liked to give the impression that he wrote with a wholly “spontaneous bop prosody.”   

     The spirit of hip is counter-cultural, but the adversarial aspect of the concept is relatively recent.  The  deepest roots are in the notion that poets bring news from a divine realm, either the gods or an extraordinary imagination.  This concept is ancient [2], but in earlier eras the artist had been largely normative rather than challenging social norms.  With the Romantic movement of the end of the eighteenth century, however, and the celebration of the individual genius some in the arts assumed a more contrary posture.  The old patrons – the nobility and the church – lost importance, displaced by middle class consumers as the economic base of much aesthetic production.  With these changes came the avant-garde and contempt for the philistine: “il faut épater le bourgeois” [3].  Some artists since have particularly aimed at provocation, particularly in movements like Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism. 

     The etymology of the term hip is a vexed question.  Over fifty years ago David Dalby suggested that it was derived from the Wolof hipi (or xipi) meaning “with open eyes” [4].  Numerous other alternatives have been suggested including earlier slang derived from hypochondriac, people with the surname Hepp, the wearing of hipboots, associations with hip-flask or with the posture of opium smoking, but a definitive answer remains elusive.  Dalby’s idea has at least the virtue of reinforcing the primary semantic import of the term.

     Whatever the ultimate origin of the word, the current usage has always suggested superior knowledge.  That is the meaning in the word’s first written appearance as slang, a definition in the “Modern Slang Glossary” published in the Cincinnati Enquirer [5] in which “hept” is defined as “to get wise or next.”  The following year Tad Dorgan used the word for several names in a cartoon and it appeared as well in George V. Hobart’s 1904 novel Jim Hickey: A Story of One-Night Stands in which an African American character says, “Say Danny, at this rate it’ll take about 629 shows to get us to Jersey City, are you hip?”  By the ‘thirties, the term was widely used among Blacks, particularly among musicians, and appeared in Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary with the definition “a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive.”  The expression was adopted as well as among white people who valued Black culture.  In his Autobiography Malcolm X describes the importance of jive talk in establishing hip credentials in Harlem as well as the appearance of whites who affected it in seeking to be more “Negro than the Negroes” [6]

     Among these white hipsters were musicians and drug-takers, some of whom, like Mezz Mezzrow, had lifelong contact with African-American culture.  Others were further toward the fringes, fans of jazz or marijuana, including artists and intellectuals, some of whom, like Kenneth Rexroth and Norman Mailer, contributed to a theory of hipness during the ‘fifties.

     Kenneth Rexroth, the poet, critic, and translator whose character is described in Dharma Bums as the “father of the Frisco poetry scene,” the organizer the historic Six Gallery reading, cites Lipton and emphasizes even in the title of his essay “Disengagement: the Art of the Beat Generation” [7] the “disaffiliation, alienation, and rejection of the young.”  The movement is thus for him less a protest than a simple opting out.  While condemning “the utter nihilism of the emptied-out hipster,” he asserts that “It is impossible for an artist to remain true to himself as a man, let alone an artist, and work within the context of this society.”  Neither Howl nor On the Road had yet been published; Rexroth’s examples of hip artists are Charlie Parker and Dylan Thomas. 

     Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” [8] proved even more influential.  He, too, stresses the hip person’s disaffection: “one is a rebel or one conforms,” “one is Hip or one is Square,” but he is more willing than the scholarly Rexroth to admit the petty criminal or addict under the title of “the American existentialist, the hipster,” a spiritual adventurer who explores “uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”  Though the more edgy, even sinister, aspects of hip culture faded, late 1950s pop culture figures like Del Close’s Geets Romo (on How to Speak Hip) and Jules Feiffer’s Huey, foil for the nebbishy Bernard in The Explainers (1960), remind us to what an extent the inarticulate, perhaps dangerous, youth played in the hip identity during the 1950s.  The same decade that saw the popularization of the Beats was fascinated as well by juvenile delinquency. 

     Some critics in the literary world offered as skewed a view as comedy albums and comic strips.  Norman Podhoretz wrote one of the fiercest denunciations of the Beat writers [9], associating them with youth crime (“young savages in leather jackets”).  Their work “can easily spill over into brutality” since for them ”kicking someone in the teeth or sticking a knife between his ribs are deeds to be admired.”  For him they are “hostile to civilization” and indeed “against intelligence itself.”  Suffering from “a pathetic poverty of feeling” the hip writers are “the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul – young men who can’t think straight and thus hate everyone who can.”  Though Podhoretz’ is one of the most extreme attacks, it is typical of the reception of the Beats among a good many critics and doubtless characterizes their image in the public as a whole.  

     Familiarity with hip artists became all but unavoidable for as the principal American periodicals Time and Life featured that curiosity, the beatnik (a derisive term first seen in print in Herb Caen’s newspaper column [10]).  In September of 1959 Life magazine printed a photo essay comparing the lifestyle of West Coast artists with that of small-town Kansas residents, giving every American a glimpse of an alternative.  Yet, apart from the misrepresentations of popular culture [11] the question of hip identity, was far from settled among the artists, most of whom were not critics, let alone theoreticians.

     The idea of disaffection, of “dropping out,” is widely shared, but the disaffection of the hip is neither random nor utterly nihilistic.  The positive values of the hip aesthetic are nearly all descended from those of the Romantics.  The most convenient demonstration of this lineage is perhaps Norman Mailer’s list of things which are hip and contrasting things which are square which he calls “a primitive foray into the more formal aspects of Hip” before noting “to my knowledge, no one yet has attempted this terrain.” [12].  In the simplest terms he labels spontaneous as hip, while orderly is square; wild is hip and practical square; instinct is hip and logic square; midnight hip, noon square (des Esseintes would have agreed).  In a social context Negro is hip, white is square; crooks are hip, while cops, naturally, are square.  Catholic is hip, presumably because of the ritual and magic, while Protestantism  is square (though perhaps Mailer would have made an exception for Black Pentecostals).  All this would have made a good deal of sense to Lord Byron.

     Some of Mailer’s opposed pairs are more imaginative, and take the reader a moment to understand.  Schrödinger’s model of the atom is hip, and Bohr’s is square, because the former takes quantum uncertainty into account.  Perverse is hip, pious square.  Some might remain somewhat obscure: physiology is hip and anatomy square (because it does not analyze process?)  the T-formation is hip, the single wing square.  He finds Nixon hip compared to John Foster Dulles, presumably because Nixon was such a fabulating hustler.  Apart from  Mailer’s turns of wit, the general pattern is clear.  Mailer privileges the intuitive, the physical, the irrational.

     Several significant elements of the hip semantic field must be added.  Among the probably erroneous etymologies for hip is one that offers an explanation for the word in the posture of users in  opium dens, reclining on one hip, while a competing explanation would have it suggest the hip flask in which one might carry liquor.  While neither seems likely as a source for the word, both assume an association between hip and mind-altering substances.  The connection, not necessarily essential, arises from three circumstances: the advocacy of pleasure-seeking implied by hip values, the ostracism from  the broader society and inclusion in a subculture that accompanies the use of illegal drugs, and the potential some such substances hold for mystical insight.  Thus Howl speaks of “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” Kerouac begins a letter ““Dig this, PEOTL EATERS OF THE HIP GENERATION,” [13] and Tower of Power’s 1973 song “What is hip?” answers “smokin’ only the best weed.”  The historical partiality of white Bohemians as well as African-Americans in  general and musicians in  particular to the use of illegal drugs strengthens the association.

     Advocates of psychedelics will prefer to call such substances entheogenic (meaning “becoming god-filled”) and point to the world-wide use of psychoactive drugs in spiritual practice from the ancient Hindu soma to the contemporary vogue for ayahuasca [14].  This element in  the meaning of hip returns to the first: to be in the know, in this case enlightened.  This grand ambition is evident in Kerouac’s description of On the Road as “an imaginative survey of a new American generation known as the ‘Hip’ (The Knowing) . . .  This new generation has a conviction that it alone has known everything or been ‘hip’ in the history of the world” [15].  Mailer had sought his “ancient heavenly connection” in existentialism, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, and Whalen in Buddhism, Richard Alpert and the Beatles in varieties of Hinduism, William Everson and Dorothy Day in a radical Christianity, but all pursued paths to spiritual liberation.

     Ironically the idea of hip may diverge from kitsch and camp in that, for all its associations with being au courant with the latest trends, hip is in substantial ways profoundly traditional.  For the sake of divertissement both kitsch and camp defend the ugly and the overdone; whereas hip aims directly at the truth, psychological, social, and cosmic, just as art has always done.  At the same time, hip values the experiential: pleasure and the aesthetic, the irrational and the mysterious, the ambivalent and the self-contradictory, and in all these ways it is deeply human.  For the hip art is play as is all experience, though the drama takes place amid “the iron gates of life.”  For the hip there is always a certain élan, a delight in the game, a winking confidence in the face of mortality, a sense that we may still laugh even if the joke is on us.

 

 

1.  Most celebrated (and influential) is Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp,” which itself cited Isherwood’s explanation in The World in the Evening in which his character Charles defines the term: “You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it, you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love …”  For him Dostoyevsky, Mozart, and El Greco were camp, while Beethoven and Rembrandt were not.  Clement Greenberg in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and Thomas Kulka in Kitsch and Art provide more hostile views.  For a variety of critics, see the essays in Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture, edited by Justyna Stępień.

2.  See, for instance, my examination of Boccaccio’s views posted this month as “Boccaccio on Poetry.”

3.  Often attributed to Baudelaire though I have not located the line in his oeuvres.  The first use is also  attributed to Privat d'Anglemont (1820–59) in the form “Je les ai épatés, les bourgeois.”   Flaubert used “terrifie les bourgeois” in a letter and by 1879 the Goncourts use “épater le bourgeois.”

4.  The term hepicat is also Wolof, meaning “one with open eyes.”  Dalby’s idea seems to have first been published in, of all things, the London Times of July 19, 1969.  It was accepted by many subsequent writers, including J . L. Dillard’s Black English (1972), Clarence Major in his Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, (1994), Joseph Holloway and Winifred Vass in The African Heritage of American English (1997).  The derivation is prominently featured in John Leland’s Hip: the History (2001).  Dissenters include Jesse Sheidlower in Slate (December 8, 2004) who used the term “crying Wolof” to indicate false African origins for Black American usage.

5.  May 9, 1903.  The puzzling “next” is perhaps a way of saying “to what will happen next.”  Dorgan had referred to “Joe Hip” and “Old Man Hip.”  Hep is usually considered to have preceded hip.  In 1947 Harry the Hipster recorded “It Ain’t Hep,” declaring that hep had become passé, superseded by hip. 

6.  The Autobiography of Malcom X, 105.  I recall a similarly disparaging usage among my hip friends in  college who called slightly younger aspirants to the scene “hippie,” equivalent to teenybopper,  well before the term came into popular usage.  This use is verified by the glossary of the 1959 comedy album How to Speak Hip, according to which a hipster is defined as "a fully paid-up member of Hip society", whereas a hippy is "a junior member of Hip society, who may know the words, but hasn't fully assimilated the proper attitude."

7.  First published in New World Writing 11 (1957), reprinted in Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg’s The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men (1958).  Rexroth reinforces the characterization of the hip as “disaffiliated” by Lawrence Lipton, doyen of the Venice Beach counter-culture.

8.  First published in Dissent (1957) and later reprinted as a pamphlet by City Lights and included in The Beat Generation  and the Angry Young Men.

9.  Norman Podhoretz, “The Know-nothing Bohemians,” Partisan Review XXV (1958).  Podhoretz was at least consistent in his reactionary activism.  In 1963 he published in Commentary "My Negro Problem—And Ours" in which he complained about his own feeling oppressed by African-Americans during his childhood, saying that Blacks "were doing the only persecuting I knew about - and doing it, moreover, to me," resulting in "the hatred I still feel for Negroes."  He later worked for the USIA, the Hudson Institute, and Rudy Giuliani. 

10.  See his column for April 2, 1958 in the San Francisco Chronicle.  Caen is also responsible for the equally annoying term hippie.  The September 21, 1959 issue of Life included a contrast of the lifestyles of West Coast hip artists with the people of small-town Hutchinson, Kansas.

11.  Maynard Krebs on the Dobie Gillis Show is one of the best-known, but even his image was subject to further devolution in the cartoon character of Shaggy Rogers on Scooby-Doo.

12. Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, p. 423.  The list, Mailer says, was originally notes for his “The White Negro” and the essay and list, he says, are “the intellectual core” of a proposed book.

13.  Letter to John Clellon Holmes, June 5, 1952 from Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940-1956, edited by Ann Charters, p 368.

14.  See my essay “Drugs and Religion” on this site at https://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2016/06/drugs-and-religion.html.

15.  Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940-1956, edited by Ann Charters, p. n224.

A Month of Films

flash reviews of twenty-two films 

Actually I ended this after only three weeks.  Perhaps I am watching too many old movies, but I have little taste for most newer ones.  The selection here is not necessarily representative, though it does include some of the genres to which I regularly return: noir, old comedies, silents.  

On Approval

     On Approval, a 1944 British comedy based on Fredric Lonsdale’s play, is a most enjoyable farce, something like watered-down Oscar Wilde.  Written, produced, and Directed by Clive Brooks, who also does a grand job portraying the cynical and witty Duke of Bristol.  The cast also includes Googie Withers, Beatrice Lillie, and Roland Culver, and the two couples attract and repel each other in the most satisfyingly symmetrical way.  The opening sequence, in a documentary style, jokes about WWI, in  a way one would have thought scarcely possible during WWII, and the closing fantasy, in which photographs of the characters become animated, are unusually clever.

 

Genuine

     Everyone loves Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but his other films are also strong Expressionist works.  Though the original subtitle was Tragödie eines seltsamen Hauses (Tragedy of a Strange House), the film was also released as Genuine: A Tale of a Vampire, in spite of the fact that Genuine is not really a vampire.  Portrayed by Fern Andra, she is a marvelously feral woman, snapping like a beast, yet fascinating men.  The primary appeal of Genuine (1920) is certainly Cesar Klein’s wonderfully weird sets, representing a world of the imagination. 

 

The Secret Window

     David Koepp’s 2004 The Secret Window, based on a Stephen King story with a score in  part by Philip Glass, is the sort of thriller one might enjoy the first time through, but which few would care to see again.  Johnny Depp’s rumpled nerves as the main character and John Turturro’s fierce understated menace as his antagonist are creditable, but there are continuity problems.  Why did the neighbor first say he saw a stranger, and then that he didn’t if Shooter never existed?  Why does the dog exit, and we don’t ever see Mort follow him until he goes out to discover the animal’s body.  The issue of the conclusion of the story, with the alteration to killing the wife, and the revelation that Shooter means “shoot her” are one-time surprises at best.  Clues that the makers may not have felt the story quite held together might be inferred from the facts that the film has an ending different from the print story and that still another variation is on the home video version.

 

Theodora Goes Wild

     This 1936 screwball comedy directed by Richard Boleslawski delivers the requisite laughs and mild social satire of its genre with Irene Dunne as a sheltered small-town resident living with her conservative maiden aunts who is somehow the pseudonymous author of a best-selling racy novel.  Her sophistication is challenged by Melvyn Douglas, her publisher’s illustrator, who promptly makes her drunk and invites her to his apartment from which she flees.  The light play with impropriety continues when he follows her to her village and manages (in an unlikely turn of events) to become a gardener as well as later, when she returns to town holding a baby some assume to be hers.  It is all light and fluffy, if implausible.  The director, an émigré artist, had been a pioneering teacher of  Stanislavski’s methods, and Orson Welles wrote and directed a radio version, also starring Dunne, for his Mercury Playhouse in 1940.

The Garden of Allah

     Directed (like Theodora Goes Wild) by Boleslawski, this 1936 film derives its charm in  part from the exotic desert landscapes – this was only the third film made using the Technicolor process –  and in part from the acting of Charles Boyer and Marlene Dietrich.  Boyer is painfully anxious, silent, and troubled as a monk who has run away from his monastery in North Africa in search of love with Dietrich, whose role here is uncharacteristically moral and thoughtful.  Contemporary viewers will probably be surprised at the horror with which she regards his abandonment of his vocation, and might be distressed rather than impressed, at his leaving his beloved to return to the Trappists.  (Anyone who accepts the Mother Superior advising Dietrich to venture out into the sands to settle her soul will find that it is all providential.)  This piety coexists with John Carradine’s turn as a presumably Islamic diviner whose role, like that of the title, is to emphasize the story’s exciting foreignness.

 

By Candlelight

     Director James Whale showed equal talent at sophisticated comedy as he did at the horror genre for which he is best known.  This 1933 film By Candlelight, adapted from Siegfried Geyer’s play by P. G. Wodehouse, is an outstanding example.  With farce elements of mistaken identities and people shunted into back rooms just as a jealous husband is about to appear, the story is consistently amusing, and it  delivers on the “pre-Code” label with frequent double entendres and suggestive details such as when the butler adds a pillow to the bed when he expects his employer to be entertaining a lady.  Even though the plot’s parallelism is transparent early on – the butler is pretending to be a prince and the maid to be a countess -- its unfolding is consistently entertaining.

 

Desert Fury

     Lewis Allen’s 1947 Desert Fury has a familiar plot-line: the vulnerable young woman is rescued from a relationship with a criminal by the hero.  The bad guy dies and the couple glides off into a happy future.  This basic narrative is enriched and complicated by several striking elements.  Luminous, almost garish,  Technicolor photography by Edwad Cronjager and Chales Lang is accompanied by a similarly sumptuous score by Miklós Rózsa that moves from heart-stopping excitement to romantic violins, to bouncy Western themes.  What has attracted most recent notice is the clear implication of a gay relationship between the characters of John Hodiak and Wendell Corey.  Though treated as a minion by his intimate friend, the latter is fiercely jealous after Lizabeth Scott’s appearance as a rival love object.  Further, Mary Astor is represented as wishing to be her daughter’s “friend” or “sister,” taking all responsibility while shielding the younger woman from the male betrayal she had herself experienced. The late forties was the boom-time for quasi-Freudian psychological elements in movies, and plenty here invites analysis as the characters trade suggestive remarks and slap each around.  Burt Lancaster, meanwhile, is the straightest one around, if the hypermasculinity of his role as cop as well as cowboy and rodeo rider can be considered normal. 

 

The Magic Christian

     Joseph McGrath’s 1969 film The Magic Christian never holds together, in spite of the considerable talent that went into it.  The director had worked on the Goon Show and writer Terry Southern and star Peter Sellers had been in part responsible for the memorable Dr. Strangelove.  Here they are joined by Ringo Starr (who walks through his part passively as though the mere glow of Beatles fame is sufficient), John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Raquel Welch, Spike Milligan, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough and Roman Polanski.  Yul Brynner does a drag number, and the film’s theme is composed by Paul McCartney.  Yet still it doesn’t work.  Randomness can be effective, when incoherence itself is a meaningful stylistic choice, but it here becomes tiresome, especially since the one joke – that people will do anything for money – is repeated far too often.   The scene in which greedy and well-dressed men wallow in gore and excrement to grab a few banknotes is vitiated by the fact that it simply underlines what has been conveyed multiple times before.  More than anything else, perhaps, I was amused by Sellers’ vocal modulations at certain moments.  McGrath had worked on Hard Day’s Night and Help as well as on the Beatles’ videos featuring a number of their hits.  Simple high spirits and chaos served just fine for those productions, but a feature film requires something more.

 

Destiny

     Fritz Lang’s Destiny, originally titled Der Müde Tod, is a fantasy in  which a young women contends with death in an attempt to reclaim her lover, in the course of which three stories of tragic love and death set in exotic locales are related.  Here the art direction  is less significant than in Genuine or Caligari, though the Near Eastern and the Chinese towns are represented with more attention  to the charm of the strange than to authenticity.  The principal story is simple enough, and its conclusion in which the lovers are reunited but only in death, is familiar.  The three internal stories are likewise elementary – in each case outsiders aligned with the powers that be frustrate and ultimately bring to a violent end the lovers’ relationship.  The chief appeal of the film as a whole is simply its joyous embrace of the cinematic possibilities: flitting among historical eras and around the globe with scenes enhanced by  special effects such as double exposures and A Hi’s flying carpet.  Bernhard Goetzke’s somber performance as Death is more sympathetic than most (He asks, ”Why do people hate me simply for doing God’s will?”), though in general highly conventional, and I was surprised to learn that Lang credited his storyline not only to the Indian tale of Savitri, but more intimately to childhood dreams and visions of his own.

 

Inside Llewyn Davis

     I have no idea why both the BBC and the New York Times feature this film on their lists of the best movies since the turn of the last century.  Though I am a fan of Dave Von Ronk and an observer if the early ‘sixties folk scene, this unpleasant and shapeless story seems to me to convey very little of either.  The assault (apparently based on a true incident) has no clear meaning in relation to the period, yet it is shown twice (somewhat confusingly).  Davis is alternately explosively nasty and quietly brooding.  Jean accuses him of caring more about the lost cat than about her, but I, for one, did, the same.  I guess it would be inappropriate to expect the Coens to represent the social warmth and idealistic politics of the period.

 

Ménilmontant

     Named by Pauline Kael as her favorite film of all time, Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 Ménilmontant’s lack of intertitles signifies the director’s dedication to purely visual cinematic values.  The montages, hand-held sequences, and double exposures are striking and, for the most part, effective.  Kirsanoff was originally Russian and surely owed much to Eisenstein (though he claimed to be self-taught), but he is innovative as well.  This film was his second.  He made three features and two shorts during the silent era and one feature with sound (including music by   Arthur Honegger and Arthur Hoérée, but never thereafter exercised creative control.   Every cinemaphile should watch this thirty-eight minutes of intense visual code. 

 

You're Telling Me!

     Though not one of Fields’ best films (among which I would count The Fatal Glass of Beer, The Barber Shop, The Pharmacist, International House, and anything with Mae West), You're Telling Me! (1934) is nonetheless consistently entertaining.  With Fields the whole point is his routines which he repeatedly reused and, unlike most comedians, copyrighted.  If he goes on a bit long, the viewer knows another routine will soon follow.  As usual, this film finds Fields in a small-minded burg, with plenty of gossipy ladies on his case and, here, a few ne’er-do-well male friends.  We expect character types, not realism, in this sort of comedy and he is disreputable, his long-suffering wife is censorious, and his daughter’s prospective mother-in-law snooty, all contributing to the background for his shtick.  The young lovers, as in Marx brothers plots (or, for that matter, most of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales), do little more than create pauses between the scenes that his audience came to see.

 

Fading Gigolo

     The viewer wonders if John Turturro’s 2013 comedy, featuring himself and Woody Allen in the leads, is having a bit of fun with itself.  Turturro is not the most obviously sexy of movie stars, and the plot is packed with implausibilities.  How likely is a dermatologist to ask her patient, a down-at-heels book dealer, if he might be able to arrange a ménage-a-trois for her?  Why does Vanessa Paradis’ Satmar character suddenly accept her suitor who had complained that she was avoiding him?  Does the rabbinical court think she’s in good standing after she says she is lonely?  What is Jade Dixon’s character doing in the story at all, except to highlight the mixture of Hasidic and Black in Williamsburg?  What will become of Murray when his shop has closed?  The film’s main charm is Turturro and Allen together.

 

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

     In 1927 F. W. Murnau, the German director best known for Nosferatu, was invited to Hollywood by William Fox where he made this melodrama.  The film was in several ways innovative.  Made just prior to the sound era, it used the Movietone sound-on-film process to include a sound track and a few other sounds.  (One hears at one point Gounod's composition Funeral March of a Marionette, later adopted by the Alfred Hitchcock television show.)  Intertitles are sparingly used, and the camera work is striking, with long tracking shots and creative use of superimposed images.  The sets are fanciful and the film is worth watching to see the dizzying city and the amusement park scenes.  Oddly, Murnau seems to have thought himself still in Europe: the unnamed couple at the center of the story have a home with a thatched roof and, at one point, an orchestra conductor tells his musicians to play “a peasant dance” whereupon the man and his wife proceed to do what looks like a mélange of Central European and Russian moves.  Sunrise reminds the twenty-first century viewer of the days when cinema was young and often more cinematic and  more purely visual than it is today. 

Bedtime Story

     A 1941 comedy directed by Alexnder Hall, a productive contract director for Columbia for years, Bedtime Story features Fredric March as a zany playwright who schemes to keep his wife , played by an elegant Loretta Young, while refusing to leave the theater.  It is a well-done if fairly routine piece of work.  A highlight for me was Robert Benchley’s performance as a sort of pal and casting director for March’s character, though Helen Westley (who had in fact been an outstanding actor, active in  the Washington Square Players and the Theatre Guild) was also quite amusing.  The mad accumulating scene toward the end in which March’s rival’s apartment is filled with crowds of people, among them servers, repair and exterminating service workers, and drunken conventioneers.  When the security staff shows up, the place erupts in a free-for-all.  I was reminded of the stateroom sequence in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, which had been released six years earlier. 

 

Scarlet Street

     Fritz Lang’s 1945 film had a similar plot and starred the same actors as his 1944 The Woman in the Window: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea.  The story, about a mousey cashier who is enthralled by a hard-hearted woman, recalls as well The Blue Angel and Of Human Bondage.  There are several convention-bending twists at the end that might surprise a first-time viewer, and the conclusion is so bleak with the murderer never apprehended to boot – that the film was banned in Milwaukee, Atlanta, and New York State.  Duryea, like Richard Widmark, exceled at playing lowlifes, and he is thoroughly despicable here, while Joan Bennett underplays for the most part, and Robinson is so very passive as to almost lose the viewer’s interest.  Curious canvases representing his character’s Sunday paintings present an odd notion of what might have intrigued the art world at the time.  They had been made by Hollywood artist John Decker, whose other works include representations of W. C. Fields as Queen Victoria and Blue Boy with the face of Harpo Marx.

 

Human Desire

     Fritz Lang’s Human Desire (1954) is certainly watchable, if only for Gloria Grahame’s wounded, pouty  performance as Vicki Buckley.  The theatrical poster declared, in lettering larger than the film’s title “She was born to be bad . . . to be kissed . . . to make trouble.”  And so she does in this version of Zola's novel La Bête humaine.  Glenn Ford’s character Jeff Warren, a recently returned Korean War veteran portrayed as an ordinary worker (he says his dream, apart from his work, is to do a lot of fishing who generally seems a nice guy.  Thus the viewer may be surprised when he more or less readily agrees to knock off her husband, his co-worker.  In Zola’s hands, and in the first two films of the story, the character suffers from hereditary madness and is seized by violent outbursts victimizing women, and the plot made a bit more sense.  There is considerable footage that will engage railroad buffs, but cinephiles would do better to see the Jean Renoir’s 1938 film La Bête Humaine with Jean Gabin. 

 

Goin’ to Town

     Originally titled Now I’m a Lady, a title to which the Hays Office objected, Goin’ to Town (1935) was directed by Alexander Hall but the film’s genius is its star and screenplay writer Mae West.  The jokes were sufficiently suggestive that the censors found plenty in the dialogue and even the songs to complain about.  (Of course, West commented in a late interview with Dick Cavett that she would sometimes include bits she knew would be cut in order to satisfy the moral authorities so they would allow her to retain the lines she really wanted to keep.)  Fans of Mae West will enjoy her sinuous postures and double entendres, as well as several bluesy songs by Sam Fain and Irving Kahal.   She even sings a bit of Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah!  Her dedicated pursuit of an English Earl, for true love yet, and her social climbing may seem a bit dissonant with her usual character, but who cares about the plot?  The original New York Times review found her to be past her prime here, but Goin’ to Town remains thoroughly entertaining with plenty of good one-liners, even if some may be slightly shopworn.

 

Cry of the Hunted

     Critics refer to veteran B-picture director Joseph H. Lewis’s 1953 Cry of the Hunted as a noir, though it is better described as a chase drama.  Not only is it set for the most part in Louisiana bayous which hold menaces far different from those of urban back alleys -- alligators, disease-inducing water, and even a pit of deadly quicksand – but its criminal is a sweet guy (though his wife is less principled).  Virtuoso actor Vittorio Gassman plays a fugitive and Barry Sullivan his pursuer (oddly, not a cop but a prison administrator).  Much recent reception of the film has focused on the homoerotic implications of the two, who are repeatedly generous to each other and end up buddies.  Even when they are grappling, it looks like horseplay.  Sullivan’s  character has a weird dream that the psychoanalytically inclined might view in this light; at any rate, it makes little sense otherwise. 

 

Three Weird Sisters

      This 1948 drama, directed by Daniel Birt, attracted my attention when I saw that Dylan Thomas was a co-screenwriter, a job that he might have regarded as hackwork but which produced an atmospheric film with a surprising storyline.  The sisters, played by Nancy Price, Mary Clare, Mary Merrall, are indeed weird as decayed aristocrats in a Welsh mining village (the setting is surely what suggested Thomas to the producers).  The ladies seem merely superannuated vestiges of the past until their sense of honorable noblesse oblige leads them to try to murder their brother in a town in which they command such respect that no one will believe them capable of such villainy until their third or fourth attempt.  This was Birt’s first feature and the final appearance of a still-young veteran of two Hitchcock films with a redoubtable name, Nova Pilbeam.

 

The Trouble with Harry

     This Hitchcock rarity, a true comedy, indicates that the master was wise when he returned to thrillers, yet this film is not without its appeal.  A consistent tension is here, with  the contrast between the oh-so-ordinary, here signified by a small Vermont village, and its residents, who turn out to be rather surprising once one gets acquainted.  For one thing, they all are very blasé about the appearance of a corpse and little concerned about informing the authorities, though each might be implicated in the man’s death.  Shirley MacLaine in her film debut is especially entertaining with her light insouciance, though Edmund Gwenn (who had played Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34^th Street) also excels in keeping it frothy and just slightly absurd as the retired captain.  However, the spirits prove a bit thin in the end, and the humor is insufficient to maintain the story’s length.  Nonetheless, the difficulties are all resolved and there are, not one, but two, marriages in view at the end.  (Do not miss the Saul Steinberg drawing with the opening credits.)

 

Lonelyhearts

      Vincent J. Donehue’s 1958 Lonelyhearts, based on Nathanael Wests’ Miss Lonelyhearts, starred  Montgomery Clift, Robert Ryan and Myrna Loy.  A principal pleasure of the film is watching Montgomery Clift’s discomfiture at life.  Though at first he feels too much empathy for his correspondents, an unfortunate encounter leads him to a more despairing cynicism, and through it all he grimaces and looks pained.  All the Angst of the 1950s teenage youth earlier defined by Marlon Brando and James Dean is here painfully reiterated.  Like Johnny in The Wild One and Jim Stark in Robel Without a Cause, Clift’s Adam White feels the pain  of not fitting in.  Robert Ryan is chilling as the cool, utterly amoral manipulative boss who sets out to destroy the young writer’s illusions (but who seem to soften at the very end).

 

 

 

The "Divine Chit-Chat" of Cowper’s The Task

  

William Cowper by George Romney

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; citations of The Task enclose book and line number in parentheses.

 

 

     R. W. had been at the center of the New York City artistic avant-garde since the ‘sixties.  When I knew him decades later, he habitually referred to the ground-breaking work he and others had produced in the most emphatically casual terms.  “We were just playing around.”  “Professors come asking me questions, but the main thing I remember is how drunk we were.”  “We did things just for the hell of it.”  Though earlier versions of Romanticism had exalted the artist as a visionary, a prophet, at least an “unacknowledged legislator,” the hip poets and painters and devisers of “happenings” took a cooler approach, as though art were simply an entertaining game.

     One effect of this pose is to foreground the value of the aesthetic.  If a work of art has no other value, no purpose, other than to be beautiful (or – expressing the same value in  milder terms --  amusing, or stimulating, or simply diverting), all the old excuses, most prominently to instruct, become incidental or irrelevant.  The poem or play or picture is justified if it allows one to pass some time in a pleasant manner.

      This stance is by no means novel.  Catullus calls his verses “nugae,” which Lewis’s dictionary defines as “jests, idle speeches, trifles” and Oscar Wilde ends his preface to Dorian Gray with the assertion “all art is quite useless.”  A few generations later Cage was maintaining “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry” and “The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all” n[1] while Frank O’Hara was touting his Personism, born, according to his account, when he realized a poem of his might just as well have been a telephone call to a friend.

     The eighteenth century is known for neo-Classicism, artificial language, and imitation of the greats of antiquity.  The era celebrated the imitation of Latin models (the Romantics in general favored the Greeks) many of which are highly conventional and structured , but which also include more relaxed occasional pieces and verse letters which prefigure Wordsworth’s advocacy of the “real language of men” in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge’s conversation poems.  The fashion of posing as natural and casual had been growing through the eighteenth century in conjunction with the foregrounding of nature and emotional expression in content and a loosening of form, a trend apparent in the popularity of the ode, conceived since Cowley as allowing irregularity. [2]  The turn away from grand themes and settings is apparent in the popularity of topographical poems, both urban (such as Gay’s “Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London” and Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower”) and rural (such as Pope’s Windsor-Forest and a number of poems detailing agricultural operations including John Philips’ Cyder and Smart’s The Hop-Garden).  Each of these is structured with a casual colloquialism, as though in conversation. 

     William Cowper’s The Task,  called “the most popular poem of the late eighteenth century,” [3] was described by Burns as “glorious” [4] and by an admiring Coleridge as “divine Chit-Chat” [5], a term that highlights its wandering informality, and indeed the poem slips from one topic to another as freely as subjects might over a dinner table.  The poem’s occasion is social and its subject arbitrary as the poet explains in a prefatory note. 

 

[“The history of the following production is briefly this:—A lady, fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and gave him the Sofa for a subject.  He obeyed, and having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and, pursuing the train of thought to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth, at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair—a volume.”]

 

The Task is then a kind of courtly display, brought off with sprezzatura to impress a lady, much as one might display elegant dress or a competence at dancing, music, or witty repartee.  While Cowper’s assigned “task,” indeed, as he says, turned somewhat “serious,” for instance when he started pitching his evangelical Anglicanism [6] and ventured on political topics such as opposition to slavery, imperialism, and France, its structure remains assertively casual, wandering from one subject to the next with no appearance of design. 

     The author’s intentionality is evident in the prominent use of the word “wandering” and words of similar import in the poem [7].  For instance, apart from calling himself a “wand’rer (I, 761) and describing himself as “wand’ring” (III, 692), Cowper says he is taking a “ramble” (I, 115) and speaks of “roaming” (IV, 232) and having “stray’d” (IV, 697).  So, apart from the arbitrary challenge that set the poet to composing, he developed the entire poem as an extended ad libitum discourse meant to give the impression that the poet is freestyling, to use a contemporary term.

    in a maneuver that recalls Sidney’s first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella ("’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’"), Cowper’s construction of what seems like spontaneity is, he asserts, the proof of his sincerity, directly expressing thoughts and feelings. 

 

Thou know'st my praise of nature most sincere,

And that my raptures are not conjured up

To serve occasions of poetic pomp,

But genuine, and art partner of them all.

 (I, 150-153) 

.     The first transition following the opening history of sofas is as playful and arbitrary as its selection of  topic.  The only link is negative. why, in fact, the writer is not associated with sofas.  That article of furniture, the poet says, is for the indolent, whereas he and the woman he addresses are physically active. 

 

The SOFA suits

The gouty limb, 'tis true; but gouty limb

Though on a SOFA, may I never feel:

For I have loved the rural walk through lanes . . .

(I, 106-110)

 

     After a lengthy survey of the pleasures of hiking in the countryside “where peace for ever reigns,” (208) he pivots then on the excuse of the single word to wish “Peace” to the artist who fashioned a certain “ingenious” (I, 210) weather toy, in which the male figure (presumably triggered by low air pressure) is “an emblem of myself,” (I, 213) willing to venture out in harsher weather than his more “tim’rous” (I, 214) friend.  Though it is unclear how the discovery is linked to bad weather, he describes then a locus amoenus, a cottage he calls “the peasant’s nest” (I, 227), remote, wild, and beautiful, where he  might find “the poet’s treasure, silence” (I, 235) and cultivate “the dreams of fancy” (I, 236). 

     This particular dream is short-lived, however, for the poet realizing that the home belongs to a poor

“wretch” (I, 239) whose hardships would outbalance his pleasures, turns on his praise of nature and exclaims “Society for me!” (I, 249).  Returning then to his country surroundings, he notes a nearby allée or “colonade” of chestnuts and the verbs shift from past to present only for the verse paragraph to conclude with and obscure reference to the landowner John Courtney Throckmorton of Weston Underwood and a line so tangled its very syntactical knottiness becomes ornamental.

 

Thanks to Benevolus — he spares me yet

These chesnuts ranged in corresponding lines,

And though himself so polish'd, still reprieves

The obsolete prolixity of shade.

 (262-265)

 

The final line is surely justifiable only as a kind of jeu d’esprit, a delight in words themselves as all-but-palpable objects, a pleasure to handle for their own sake prior to any consideration of meaning, reminiscent of Wallace Stevens.

     Rambling on in the present tense, he then happens upon a molehill which suggest people’s mines in that it “disfigures earth” (I, 275), leaving a visual record of “the mischief he has done.”  (I, 277)  This he then associates with the vandalism of some “clown” (I, 288) who carved his names on a tree motivated by “the zeal t’immortalize himself” (I, 284).  The faintly self-mocking parallel with the poet himself, recording his own bucolic strolls in words he might hope would be remembered is unmistakable.

     Still, Cowper’s pleasure in rural rambles as well as in words is displayed.  The joy he expresses when seeing the light scattered by tree branches anticipates the dance of Wordsworth’s daffodils. 

 

So sportive is the light

Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance,

Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick,

And darkning and enlightning, as the leaves

Play wanton, ev'ry moment, ev'ry spot.

                                                            (345-349)

 

      Though this survey has covered only half the first book of The Task, the pattern is clear and does not change.  To continue detailing his divagations would be to belabor the point.  Cowper goes on to consider wide range of aesthetic, political, and religious ideas in the same desultory manner, reproducing his rural strolls in equally meandering mental associative streams.  Like a scintillating conversationalist, he has an observation for every occasion, and he drifts freely from one to the next.  His many serious opinions are stated in an entirely unstructured manner. 

     This offhand procedure is not itself vacant of meaning.  By suggesting that anything, even a sofa, can be made an aesthetic object, Cowper allows for the possibility of a generally illuminated consciousness in which every experience is equally profound.  If he risks the appearance of a slovenly formlessness, he also opens the potential for all life to be poetry.  His assertively non-functional discourse foregrounds the value of signification itself, that distinctly human trait, and its purely recreational value.  Cowper does have preferences and values, and he never shrinks from expressing them, but after doing so he moves on to another topic, and his path remains a self-justifying promenade.

 

  

 

1.  Silence.

 

2.  Cowley was followed in this practice by Dryden Behn, and Pope, later by Gray, Collins, Thomson, and Cowper and then by Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.  Aiming for the sublime, many of these authors adopted an excited tone to dramatize their release from rigorous formal conventions. 

 

3.  Peter Leithart “The Task” Presidential essays, Theopolis Institute, available online at https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/the-task/.

 

4. Letter to Mrs. Dunlop of December 25, 1795.

 

5.  Rosemary Ashton in The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (p. 30) quotes Lamb’s repetition of Coleridge’s phrase.

 

6.  Cowper was a close friend of John Newton, author of “Amazing Grace.”

 

7.  For details, see Raymond Bentman, “Robert Burns's Declining Fame,” Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer, 1972).  Bentman traces a similar use of “wandering” in Thomson’s The Seasons.