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.

The Anti-Aesthetic Aesthetic of Farrell’s Studs Lonigan

 

     Admirers and critics alike must acknowledge that James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan preserves a glorious array of slang from the ‘twenties.  Studs and his young friends on Chicago’s South Side know every mean ethnic slur including some that were unfamiliar to me such as “schonicker” for Jew (though fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow uses it, too).  Their Irish parents may have contributed such Britishisms as “gaffer” and “shag,” while the Black population whose spread dislodged the Lonigans from the old neighborhood contributed “jazz” (in the sense of having sex) and “getting one’s ashes hauled.”  Everything good is “jake.”  Good things may also be “swell,” but this word often carries suggestions of snobbish arrogance.  “That’s a swell suit” means approval but a bit of surprise at the wearer’s implied social pretension.  In Studs’ world one can say “She’s a keen girl” and “keen” carries sexual associations absent from its use today (if, indeed, it is used today). 

     Of course, the elements of a story that are most up-to-date are those that first sound dated and soon require footnotes.  Yet to a twenty-first century reader, it is not the language alone that is out of fashion.  James Farrell himself and his monumental trilogy Studs Lonigan are to a certain extent passé.  With the privileging of the largely European avant-garde tradition and its American lineage descending from Gertrude Stein, with naturalism as a whole démodé, it is little wonder that few critics care to comment on the proletarian novels of the Depression era.  The left-wing views that motivated a legion of agitators among the authors of the ‘thirties are now more likely to be found among the obscure scholarly publications of university mandarins practicing New Historicism or Gender Studies.

     Yet at one time books like Studs Lonigan were not only popular but seemed to many the strongest representatives of American literature, with Studs prominent in most reckonings.  [1]  Readers today might have to think a minute to understand H. L. Mencken’s insistence, repeated at least from 1917 on, that Chicago was the most important city in American literature.  For him the most innovative and authentically American writing developed in the Midwest, the source he thought of “all literary movements that have youth in them, and a fresh point of view, and the authentic bounce and verve of the country and the true character and philosophy of its people.”  In part Mencken’s encomium derived from his conviction that in the West “originality still seems to be put above conformity.” [2]  

     Mencken was surely cocking his snoot at New York City, but the gesture carries a meaning beyond provocation.  If the United States is conceived as the place of liberation from moribund Europe ways, writers from the Midwest and West, further removed from the conservative values and decorum associated with the old wealth of the Northeast and the façade of gentility among the Southern plantation owners, might offer the greatest freedom of all.  Writers from states lying well west of the Hudson River such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Sherwood Anderson, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Edward Dahlberg, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren challenged received ideas in wildly different ways.

     In this American context, influenced by the socially conscious naturalism of Zola, which itself developed from Flaubert and Balzac, Farrell’s Studs Lonigan opus, three novels amounting to nearly a thousand pages, seemed a ground-breaking and monumental achievement.  Farrell’s uncompromising treatment of poverty written on the cusp of the Depression was daring in its sexual content as well as its radical thematic premises. 

     Sex in Studs’ world was often rough and thoughtless.  His story includes descriptions of taboo topics such as masturbation, homosexuality, and gang-rape.  Well aware of the possibility of censorship, Farrell excised certain especially explicit episodes, yet Farrell and his publisher Vanguard remained anxious about the consequences of the content that remained [3].  The original introduction assured readers of the sociological value of the work but cautioned that “it is not for children or for the unsophisticated.”  Its unsparing realism and lack of “prudery” means the book might “shock the naïve adult who has lost touch with youth.” [4]  As a further cautionary move, the 1932 Vanguard dust jacket bore a special notice informing the public that the book was a “clinical document,” directed solely at “physicians, surgeons, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, social workers, teachers and other persons having a professional interest in the psychology of adolescence.”  A later edition included a second and bolder introduction, stressing the story’s social implications, in particular the failure of the Catholic Church, as though some ground had been gained in writers’ ability to deal with sexuality [5].  Nonetheless, the book was still to encounter censorship [6].

     No one can doubt Farrell’s role in increasing the writer’s freedom in America.  Whereas Mark Twain had been torn between his rebellious Huck side and his conformist Tom Sawyer tendencies, the milieu of Farrell’s novels is wholly that of his lower middle-class characters, albeit from the point of view of Danny O’Neill, himself on the rise in education and status.  The inclusion of sexual incidents so significant in people’s lives yet long proscribed in fiction is surely salutary.  Furthermore, the open espousal of revolutionary economic views, in Farrell’s case Trotskyite, was novel in his youth, though for a time during the later ‘thirties it seemed as though a good portion of the American intelligentsia had become “fellow travelers.”  Farrell’s role in pushing back sexual and political boundaries is clear.  What has been debated from the start has been the aesthetic quality of his work, whether his fictions possess the style, the beauty to make great novels.   

    The verdict has often been far from flattering.  Most critics, even Farrell’s admirers, concede his weaknesses, prominent among them being a graceless style.  To Alfred Kazin he was the “the plainest” and “most ungainly” of writers; Irving Howe found his prose afflicted by “soggy repetitiveness;” and Mark Shorer observes that “in sheer clumsiness of style no living writer exceeds him.”  The point need not be belabored, since virtually all critics have concurred to one degree or another in defining these weaknesses [7].  Luna Wolf, who worked with Farrell for nine years as a secretary and editor said “He was an extremely creative writer, but he was not a great stylist.  That’s always a problem with his writing.  It’s a shame.  Because he could have been right up there.  It’s terrible that he had this flaw.  He was a writer who, in a way, couldn’t write” [8].

     Farrell was quite aware of modern developments in literature.  He did in fact live in Paris for a year during 1931 and 1932 while writing Studs Lonigan.  His use of popular songs, fragments, newspaper headlines and other materials recalls John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy.  Yet, when he attempted a more radical deviation from conventional narrative, as in Studs’ terminal delirium, most of his readers find he had little success.  (He later imagined he might write a Joycean book about O’Neill’s deathbed consciousness.)  While others, like Lola Ridge and Edward Dahlberg, managed to combine a proletarian perspective with innovative technique, Farrell was never at home with anything but straight story-telling.

     It is hardly a justification to claim that, since Farrell’s character were so often bored, asking each other what they should do, seeking intoxication, loveless sex, and risky or cruel pastimes just to get through the day, that readers should feel similar ennui.  The deadening repetition of the daily routine, relieved mostly by suffering, ought, of course, to be vividly portrayed, not reproduced in the reader.  This general truth is apparent in the vernacular, at first quite fascinating, but which becomes tiresome because it is always the same.  The frequent use of vulgarities flattens their impact until the transgressive words fade to having no specific meaning.  Their significance is only general, implying a low social status and a reactive worldview: rough, cynical, semi-anaesthetized, but the same in every utterance.  The worst consequence is that such language, even if it initially shocks, rapidly becomes tedious.

     Yet Studs does retain a readership if no high spot on Parnassus.  How can one account for Studs’ continuing appeal to many readers?  The wealth of local color – not only slang usage, but references to specific Chicago buildings, local politics, and the like – may underly some readers’ pleasure.  Others may applaud Farrell’s principled advocacy for socialism, consistent for a lifetime.  But the primary artistic appeal of Studs Lonigan is paradoxical: the work exemplifies an anti-aesthetic aesthetic.

     Such appreciation of art on anti-aesthetic (rather than non-aesthetic) grounds is not a new practice. The twentieth century produced a theory to explain the beauty of objects considered camp or kitsch, but these are not the only possible categories for ironic appreciation. Some years ago I saw an exhibit of tiny editions of poetry that celebrated poets in the ‘fifties and early ‘sixties produced to distribute to friends. Some were mimeographed, all were crude-looking, but this is the very quality that enhanced their meaning for me, indicating unmistakably that the authors were hip enough to cultivate their development with showy disregard for fame and the marketplace.  They intended their work to be defiantly unprofessional-looking.  At the time I myself was making visual poems using paste-on letters, always slightly out of place.  The lack of art school precision seemed just right for broadsides distributed on the street. 

     The shabbiness of the product can be an asset; it can be a seal of authenticity.  I am thinking of a wide variety of examples: Kenneth Anger films or the Cockettes, the off-key ebullience of a Mexican band in the zocalo, the plastic tableware of a marvelous hole-in-the-wall eatery, art brut, the lumpy forms of some Zen pottery, the slapdash simplicity of some graffiti-inspired painting, the creaky voice of an aged Appalachian singer, delivering a tune from a half a millennium ago.  In each case the imperfection seems not just appropriate, but expressively beautiful, however much in contrast to ordinary standards.

     There is a similar technical flouting of the usual rules of art in other writers of whom I am fond. Nelson Algren and then Willard Motley followed Farrell in chronicling Chicago. In Jack Kerouac (and Wolfe before him) the naive sexuality and loping, sometimes wandering, rhetorical periods convey passion and vulnerability. Though many pages of Henry Miller seem to have been hastily written, an intoxicating esprit pervades his narration and, even more, his essays.  His casualness is part of his style and this reader would not have it any other way. Norman Mailer could make stumbling both on the page and in person look like the poignant moves of a great if flawed hero.

     So, while I concur with Farrell’s critics in their negative judgements, I do not regret reading the three volumes of Studs’ life once more. I find in it not just life, but a kind of beauty common as dirt and perhaps sometimes as fruitful.

     At times Farrell can strike just the right note.   Fragments of "Just A Gigolo" are quoted a number of times.  This song was wildly popular, the first hit of Bing Crosby’s long career when it was issued in 1932. In its original form this was an Austrian cabaret song of a hussar fallen in the world to the status of gigolo.  In Crosby’s version the speaker is a WWI veteran in a Paris café who laments; 

 

When the end comes I know

They'll say just a gigolo

As life goes on without me

 

The tone of weary, lack-love suffering, of a life pushed by inescapable currents, directionless, can apply to a poor neighborhood of Chicago as well as to the capitals of Europe.  The confidence implied by the left-wing parade near the conclusion of Judgement Day cannot overcome the pathos of this fragment of song, or the suffering of the lives recorded in the fine detail of Farrell’s memory, not to mention lives not so very different, being lived today on a thousand urban streets, including those of Chicago’s great South Side. 

 

 

 

1.  Vestiges of this prestige persisted.  In 1999 the editors of the Modern Library included Studs Lonigan in their list of the hundred best novels of the century.

2.  The quotations are from the October 28, 1917 Chicago Sunday Tribune.  Mencken also wrote an essay for the London Nation (not to be confused with the American journal of the same name) of April 12, 1920 heralding Chicago as the “Literary Capital of the United States.”  Nelson Algren, a strong but late representative of gritty Chicago realism and left-wing sentiments, cited Mencken’s judgement approvingly in his Chicago: City on the Make.

 3.  One he turned into a short story titled “Boys and Girls” which is included in the Library of America edition of Studs Lonigan.

 4.  Frederic M. Thrasher, “Introduction,” Young Lonigan. Thrasher was a professor of education and author of a study of urban youth titled The Gang.

5.  This was written by University of Chicago English professor and radical activist Robert Morss Lovett.

6.  Studs Lonigan was seized by authorities as obscene in Canada in 1944 and in Philadelphia in 1948.  The latter case led to a significant decision by Judge Curtis Bok who decided in Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Gordon et al. that the works of Farrell, as well as those of Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell which had been seized were nothing but “obvious efforts to show life as it is” and could not be suppressed.

7.  Kazin’s comments are in a largely sympathetic obituary in the New York Times, Sept. 16, 1979 titled “James T. Farrell, 1904‐79.”  For Irving Howe, see “Naturalism and Taste” in A Critic’s Notebook and for Shorer, “Technique as Discovery,” The Hudson Review Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1948).

8.  Robert K. Landers, An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell.  Note the mildly apologetic tone of Landers’ title.  When Wolf left him in 1962 to work at McGraw-Hill, he angrily accused her: “All right!  Go ahead!  Leave the sinking ship!”

9.  The original song was "Schoner Gigolo," (1928), first sung in America by the French star Irene Bordoni.  The song has been recorded by a great many artists, including Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, Thelonius Monk, and Louis Prima (for whom it was something of a hit in 1956).

Convention and Innovation in Stephen Duck’s “The Thresher’s Labour”

 

     Anticipations of Romantic values and literary practices occur throughout the eighteenth century.  Many critics have traced the origins of specific Romantic values in the cults of sentiment and the sublime, the “graveyard school,” and the burgeoning interest in the concept of natural genius and an interest in the works of the archaic, uneducated, and “primitive” writers. This latter development was reflected in greater attention to early poets as well as ballads and other folk materials resulting in the publication of Percy’s Reliques (1765) as well as the frauds of Macpherson’s Ossian (1761) and Chatterton’s Rowley (1777).  This interest led also to the recognition of a number of uneducated working class poets regarded as “natural geniuses,” among them Mary Collier (whose first publication was in 1739), Henry Jones (1746), Mary Leapor (1748), James Woodhouse (1764), Ann Yearsley (1785), John Frederick Bryant (1787), and a good many others.  During the time when writers learned rules of neo-Classical composition adapted from Boileau by Dryden and Pope, some readers sought something different and found support for the idea of untutored art by citing the authority of a Latin tag: Poeta nascitur, non fit (the poet is born, not made).

     Pastoral and georgic poetry might seem to pose a particular problem of decorum since agricultural work is associated with poverty and ignorance and the poetic art with urban sophistication.  Hesiod enjoyed enormous prestige from his position next to Homer but his Works and Days was clearly not a courtly document but included folk traditions and details of actual husbandry.  Likewise the sophisticated urbanite Theocritus may have adapted some language he had heard actually used by herdsmen, but they surely did not sing in the epic dactylic hexameter that he used.  In the English Renaissance the authoritative George Puttenham characterized “Eglogues” as “shepheardly talke” which “in base and humble stile by maner of Dialogue, vttered the priuate and fami∣liar talke of the meanest sort of men, as shepheards, heywards and such like.” [1]  Yet he also maintains, with a lofty embrace of contradictions characteristic of him to claim that such poems were in fact sophisticated symbolic artifices.  Their true focus was not after all “to counterfait or represent the rusticall manner of loves and communication” but rather “under the vaile of homely persons to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters” even “to enforme morall discipline, for the amendment of mans behaviour.” [2]

     For Thomas Tickell in the early eighteenth century the pastoral is in fact defined by its fantastic unreality.  Pastoral poetry “transports us into a kind of Fairy Land. . . An Author, that would amuse himself by writing Pastorals, should form in his Fancy a Rural Scene of perfect Ease and Tranquility, where Innocence, Simplicity and Joy abound. It is not enough that he write about the Country; he must give us what is agreeable in that Scene, and hide what is wretched.” [3]

     Addison in his preface to Dryden’s Virgil similarly had no doubt that “the precepts of husbandry are not to be delivered with the simplicity of a plowman, but with the address of a poet.” “The low phrases and turns of art that are adapted to husbandry,” should not “have any place in such a work as the Georgic, which is not to appear in the natural simplicity and nakedness of its subject, but in the pleasantest dress that poetry can bestow on it.”  Rather than realism, Addison called for “pomp” and “dignity,” avoiding “meanness” and “letting his subject debase his style.”  “Nothing which is a phrase or saying in common talk, should be admitted in to a serious poem; because it takes off from the solemnity of the expression and gives it too great a turn of familiarity.”  For Addison, Virgil “breaks the clods and tosses the dung about with an air of gracefulness.”

     All the same Addison was open-minded enough in some moods to admit that “Human Nature is the same in all reasonable Creatures.” He recognized his own “particular Delight in hearing the Songs and Fables that are come from Father to Son, and are most in Vogue among the common People,” noting that “it is impossible that any thing should be universally tasted and approved by a Multitude, tho' they are only the Rabble of a Nation, which hath not in it some peculiar Aptness to please and gratify the Mind of Man.”  He makes good on this general enthusiasm with a detailed appreciation of “Chevy Chase.” [4]  He came to include Homer, Pindar, and Shakespeare among the “great natural Genius's that were never disciplined and broken by Rules of Art.” [5]

     Interest in contemporary untutored “natural” authors enjoyed a vogue from the mid-eighteenth century on, supported by readers’ growing curiosity and appreciation and the willingness of some to exchange literary refinement for homely vigor.  The issue was under witty and spirited discussion as early as 1714 when Gay published his “Six Pastorals” as The Shepherd's Week with a preface ridiculing the artificiality of pastoral conventions.  He promised that his poem would be a “right simple eclogue after the true ancient guise of Theocritus,” unlike the productions of “certain young men of insipid delicacy.”  “It is my purpose, gentle reader, to set before thee, as it were a picture, or rather lively land- scape of thy own country, just as thou mightest see it, didest thou take a walk into the fields at the proper season.” [6]  Gay then proceeded with richly artificial rhetorical poems ornamented with allusions both ancient and modern with as little reference to actual farmworkers as any of his predecessors.   

     The fact is, of course, that Gay lacked the experience to write as an authentic rustic.  Among the most celebrated of the “natural” writers who did actually belong to the working-class who benefited from this trend was Stephen Duck, the agricultural worker whose most well-known poem today is “The Thresher’s Labour.” [7]  Even before his own publication of Poems on Several Occasions (1736), as many as ten pirated editions of Poems on Several Subjects (1730) appeared, signaling the public’s eager curiosity.  His oddity was highlighted on the title page which not only prominently identified the poet as “a poor Thresher” but even specified his wages: “Four Shillings and Six Pence per Week.”  These surprising facts are made even more impressive by adding the circumstance that the poems were “publickly read” by the Earl of Macclesfield to “Her Majesty” who thereupon deigned to offer the writer a home and an annuity.  Though George II had scant literary interests, his wife Caroline indeed so favored Duck that she made him keeper of her private library in a fanciful grotto called Merlin’s Cave where a journalist said “the work of the Learned surrounded him [Merlin], and the celebrated Stephen Duck is both his House-keeper and his Poet Laureat.” [8]   Thus both Duck’s rusticity and his acceptability were proven before the reader had perused a line.

     The early pension was one of many signs of his popular success.  He was the talk of the town.  Satires of his biography and his poetry appeared. [9]  He was introduced to London’s beau monde in the eighteenth-century version of radical chic.  Joseph Spence, at the time Professor of Poetry at Oxford, wrote a biography to preface Duck’s first book and recommended it to all, including his friend Pope to whom he wrote that Duck was “an Excellent Poet” “of particular good sense.”  Both Pope and Swift were subscribers to Duck’s Poems on Several Occasions (as was the Prince of Wales), though the two poets were less impressed than the Rev. Spence. 

     Pope, for instance, though finding Duck “an honest man,” sniffed that “most villages could supply verses of equal force” and mocked Duck’s role with the Queen’s library, in a satiric picture of modern poetasters artificially boosting each other’s reputation

 

Call Tibbald Shakespear, and he'll swear the Nine

Dear Cibber! never match'd one Ode of thine.

Lord! how we strut thro' Merlin's Cave, to see

No Poets there, but Stephen, you, and me.        [10]

 

 

     Swift for his part griped about Duck’s pension in letters to Pope and Gay and published his reaction publically as well.

 

 

On Stephen Duck, the Thresher and Favourite Poet.

A quibbling epigram. 1730.

 

THE thresher Duck could o'er the queen prevail,

The proverb says, "no fence against a flail."

From threshing corn he turns to thresh his brains;

For which her majesty allows him grains:

Though 'tis confest, that those, who ever saw

His poems, think them all not worth a straw!

⁠Thrice happy Duck, employed in threshing stubble!

Thy toil is lessen'd, and thy profits double.

 

 

In representing Duck’s mind as worthless straw or stubble, Swift deftly associates the poet’s rural occupation with stupidity, quite naturally concluding that Duck’s poems are “all not worth a straw!”

     While estimations of its value might differ, Duck clearly offered a voice hitherto little-heard in literature, a working man speaking from a class perspective.  [11]  From this perspective the traditional  pastoral conventions seem inappropriate.  In  the tumult of his work poetry, indeed, language at all, becomes inaudible.

 

The Voice is lost, drown'd by the louder Flail.

But we may think — Alas! what pleasing thing,

Here, to the Mind, can the dull Fancy bring?

(51-3)

 

Even could the Muses be heard, their songs would be out of place on a working farm.

 

’Tis all a gloomy melancholy Scene

Fit only to invoke the Muse’s Spleen

                                                         (60)

 

 

       In the morning voice of the “Master” the reader hears not a joyful anticipation of plenty but an irritable foreman: “Sure large Days-works I well may hope for now.” (27)  And in the afternoon he is never satisfied: “Ye scatter half your Wages o’er the Land” (244), denouncing the laborers as “Rogues.” (74)

     Duck appeals to the reader who is presumed never to have been in his position.

 

Let those who feast at Ease on dainty Fare

Pity the Reapers who their Feasts prepare”

(246)  

 

“Think what a painful Life we daily lead,” (251) he cries out, with “toils scarce ever ceasing.” (248)  As for beauty the workers are said to destroy the landscape, turning “pleasant Prospects” to “a gloomy Waste.” (231).  Their reaping turns the “Beauties” of the field to “Ruin” (223) and “sure Desolation.” (229)  In a bathetic burlesque of heroic war-making in which the field workers resemble a troop of marauding Muslims. (230)

    Duck’s voice is far from consistent, however.  As one of the poem’s most acute critics has noted, the variation in voice is one of the most striking aspects of “The Thresher’s Labour.” [12]  When the first person plural is used, it is the workers speaking collectively, Duck among them, while it is clearly a disciple of Pope who opens the piece and ornaments it throughout, and every now and then the supervisor or “Master” rails to the laborers with consistent antagonism.  While the first and third of these foreground the socio-economic relationships of the actors, it is the second that reveals most about Duck and his use of Augustan convention.

     The first lines of the opening address to both Muse and patron establish the verses’ bona fides in poetic discourse, indicating familiarity with Classical lore and by patronage a connection to the respectable world.  He does insert a mention of his own goddess’s “Poverty” (6) and he goes on to mention the “Toils of each revolving Year;/ Those endless Toils, which always grow anew,” (8-9) striking a note that must have jarred his genteel audience while perhaps delighting the more fanciful among them with its very novelty.

     In what might be considered the central image of the poem – the thresher threshing – the heroic epic tone strains against the insistently bathetic realistic details.  Almost as though he had intended to illustrate Pope’s 1728 essay "Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry" [13], Duck mixes here the lofty and the familiar in the most provocative manner.  Though the grain is “Ceres’ Gifts” (14), to the farmer it brings only intimations of ”the Profits of the Year” (16).  The threshers who work “Divested of [their] Cloathes” wield their flails like “Weapons” (36) of war, momentarily resembling valiant warriors.

 

 

The CYCLOPS' Hammers could not truer chime;

Nor with more heavy Strokes could Aetna groan,

When VULCAN forg'd the Arms for THETIS' Son.

In briny Streams our Sweat descends apace,

Drops from our Locks, or trickles down our Face.

                                                                            (39-43)

 

References to Cyclops, Aetna, and Vulcan, then, are deployed in order to introduce the sweat “in briny Streams” running down the workers’ faces. [14]  Bathos could hardly be more audacious. 

     The intentional mingling of high and low strains might produce comedy (as in Gay’s The Shepherd’s Week), but here the principal effect is simply incongruity.  Cyclops and Vulcan have little relevance to the scene, nor do they play a role in a greater mythological structure shaping the poem, and when the passage culminates in sweat, the effect is inevitably ridiculous.  Duck is only too clearly straining to establish his own Classicism, imitating his university-educated fellow poets by decorating his lines with adventitious learned references. 

     Throughout the poem the comparison of the workers to ancient martial heroes enables the allusive machinery to operate though it is regularly ambiguous.  While their implements are called weapons (36), and the workers are themselves are “Hero-like” (114), they resemble Muslim not Christian warriors (230).  This denigrating qualification is intensified with their later identification with “Ethiopians” (65) not to mention “Rogues” (74) and “School-boys” (78). 

     Duck testifies from years of experience when he calls the field-workers occupation a “dull Task” (68), deserving of “Pity” (247).  The contests of Achilles and Hector or Aeneas and Turnus had a victor and of nations, too, to the winner goes the glory, but on the farm, there is no triumph no matter how dedicated the worker.

 

 

All strive to vanquish, tho' the Victor gains

 No other Glory, but the greatest Pains.

                                                                   (118-9)

 

 

For this reason the entire enterprise seems in the end a “Cheat.” (277)  Facing the challenge before him, the thresher responds soldier-like with energy and dedication, but the fact that he never gets anywhere, that the same tasks must be endlessly repeated, renders his occupation ignoble.

     Duck’s biography leaves little doubt that he himself escaped sweating in the fields as soon as he was able.  He had not even wished to write about the work experience that in his day and yet today endows his poetry with particular interest and he never returned to the topic.  Becoming a priest, he was first chaplain to a courtier and then pastor of a church in Surrey. [15]  He surely adopted the most prestigious literary practices of his day with the hope that he might thereby gain acceptance, and chance brought him extraordinary success.  His use of Classical references in spite of having through no fault of his own failed to receive the thorough education in Greek and Latin poets then standard for the wealthy must always seem factitious, tentative.  He was an expressive enough poet that his dubious status as an outsider is always evident.  He genuflects before the names of ancient mythology as one would before a patron.

     When directly commenting on his work experience, Duck never softens or deceives.  He cannot, like some socialist writers, conceive of labor as itself heroic; it is for him merely a harsh reality.  The closing lines of “The Thresher’s Labour” figure the farm hand not as a valiant warrior but as Sisyphus, a vicious man undergoing eternal punishment.

 

 

THUS, as the Year's revolving Course goes round,

No Respite from our Labour can be found:

Like SISYPHUS, our Work is never done;

Continually rolls back the restless Stone.

New-growing Labours still succeed the past;

And growing always new, must always last.

                                                                       (281-286)

 

 

This choice of Sisyphus, which casts the collective “our Work” as a meaningless grind, leading only to fatigue, harmonizes oddly with Camus’ image for the absurdity of human life in the twentieth century.  Though the reader may not share Duck’s ambition to find acceptance in proper society, his suffering and alienation are universal.  His own wish to rise in status prevented his critiquing the system he sought to enter and thus qualifying for the role of proto-radical some would like to give him.  Nonetheless, writing about rural life was never again so wholly imaginary as it had been for his predecessors.  Varying degrees of country realism may be traced in Thomson, Crabbe, Wordsworth, and the Tennyson of Enoch Brand and the Northern Farmer (both Old and New) as the influence of Classical poets and the use of ancient references has faded. 

     The tension between the learned gentility of the poetic conventions and unpretty facts like sweat and economic exploitation is the wellspring of Duck’s poem.  Using the heroic couplets associated with Dryden’s Aeneid and Pope’s Homer the very name of which implies grandeur, aristocratic values, and war, Duck produced a poetic chimera compounded of high and low, with attitudes from either end of the social scale mingled with little design and suggesting no new synthesis

     Duck was able to hone his own poetic skills sufficiently to accomplish his goals.  He impressed the Queen and the Oxford Professor of Poetry with his pastiche of successful Augustan poets, but he also gained readers, both then and now, by recording a genuine worker’s voice.  If the high-flown rhetoric and gritty detail never really work together, “The Thresher’s Labour” nonetheless provides the reader with a sympathetic experience of the rigor and hopelessness of manual labor, little unchanged for the greater part of humanity yet today.  For that alone it remains worth reading.

 

 

 

 

1.      1.  George Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie I.18.

2.      2.  Puttenham, Arte I.11.

3.      3.  The Guardian No. 22, 6 April 1713.  The essay was long attributed to Addison.

4.      4.  The first two quotations are from Spectator 70 (May 21, 1711).  The theme continued in Spectator 74 (May 25, 1711).  Then in Spectator 85 (June 7, 1711) he continued the theme with an account of the sentimental broadside  ballad “Two Children in the Wood” in which, though the song was “a plain simple Copy of Nature, destitute of the Helps and Ornaments of Art,” he found “a most exquisite Pleasure.”

5.      5.  Spectator 160 (Sept. 3, 1711).

6.      6.  "Proeme,” The Shepherd’s Calendar.  The immediate target is Ambrose Philips, whose eclogues rivaled Pope’s in popularity for a time.

7.      7.  His other poems are nearly all occasional or religious.  Duck had written about his agricultural work only at the suggestion of his patron, Rev. Stanley.  In his own time his Biblical “The Shunammite” was widely applauded.  Having acquired a late education, Duck became a priest.

8.      8.  Country Journal, No. 15, 1735, issue 489.

9.      9.  The Thresher’s Miscellany: or, Poems on Several Subjects, Written by Arthur Duck appeared even before the real Duck’s work.

10  10.  Alexander Pope, “The Second Epistle Of The Second Book Of Horace,” 137-140.  In the dense semantic underbrush Pope constructs he cleverly played on Dryden’s translation of Virgil Eclogue III 162 with his l. 146 "And you shall rise up Otway for your pains."  With even greater subtlety Pope set a line from Horace (Epistles II.2) as epigraph: “Ludentis speciem dabit, et torquebitur” (“he will give the appearance of playing and be turned”) which implies the decline of letters and plays on the original sense of “turning,” meaning the poet’s ability to assume different moods and voices.

11    11.  Though not educated in the conventional school curriculum, Duck aspired to the same stylistic ideals as the accepted culture of the day.  In this he differs from those today called “outsider” artists.  His class viewpoint was prudentially softened in the authorized edition, most dramatically by eliminating the lines (17-18 in the 1730 edition) referring to the landlord.

1      12.  Bridget Keegan, “Georgic Transformations and Stephen Duck's ‘The Thresher's Labour’", Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 41, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 2001).

1      13.  Pope had recommended that the poet prepare “by familiarizing his mind to the lowest objects” (Ch. 7) by that means developing a style “frothy, pert, and bouncing” (Ch. 4).

14    14.  Sweat, clearly a strong marker of outdoor labor, reappears four other times in Duck’s poem.

15    15.  His apparent suicide has by some over the years been ascribed to his rise in social standing though without evidence.

Banjo

Page references in parentheses are to the Harvest paperback from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

     Claude McKay’s 1929 novel Banjo provides a fascinating view of the Marseilles demimonde inhabited by a loose group of copains of African descent who live by panhandling, casual labor, and periodic work as seamen. Subtitled “A Story without a Plot,” the narrative is as episodic and aimless as the lives of the characters depicted. Apart from employing a sort of Chekhovian “slice of life,” still something of a novelty when the book was published, this technique is altogether appropriate for McKay’s theme which privileges id over superego, immediate sensual experience over ratiocination. Accepting the racial mythology which had been used to denigrate blacks, he simply inverted the associated values, celebrating intuition and the wisdom of the African body as inherently superior to the enervated European mind. [1]
     To contemporary readers this bipolar opposition is likely to seem pernicious for purely political reasons as it treats ethnic difference as essential. In spite of the fact that Taloufia, Banjo, Bugsy, Goosey, and the gang often discuss racism, Marcus Garvey, black nationalism, and similar issues, the book’s chief focus is more psychological than historical or social. In fact, while always acknowledged, racism and black alienation are regularly secondary to the book’s celebration of life lived in the moment and the embrace of immediate sensual experience.
     The line of hedonistic thinking extends from antiquity [2]. Fifty years before McKay’s book, Walter Pater had formulated a passionate cri de coeur from similar attitudes with his ambition “to burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” The same attitude accompanied by a racial paradigm like that in Banjo is central to Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” where petty hoodlums are praised for violent crime because their experience is so intense.
     The tone of the whole volume is established in the opening passage in which Banjo exults in the breakwater, calling it “mahvelous” and “wonderful.” The book is filled with breathless excited catalogues. [3] One example occurs in Chapter 11 “Everybody Doing It.”


The scene was a gay confusion – peddlers with gaudy bagatelles; Greek and Armenian vendors of cacahuettes and buns; fishermen calling shell-fish; idling boys in proletarian blue wearing vivid cache-col and caps; long-armed Senegalese soldiers in khaki, some wearing the red fez; Zouaves in strking Arab costumes; surreptitious sou gamblers with their dice stands; a strong mutilated man in tights stunting; excursion boats with tinted signs and pennants rocking thick against each other at the moorings – everything massed pell-mell together in a great gorgeous bowl. (140)


     Such delight – the scene is “gorgeous” -- is familiar to modern American readers. One might almost be reading Whitman or Jack Kerouac. Ray and Banjo, and presumably their author as well, are Ur-hipsters.
     It is this anti-philosophy, not racial theorizing, that leads Ray to make such currently unacceptable statements as “We are a fun-loving race” (194) and to admire Banjo for his “negation of intellect” (242) or to note “the happy irresponsibility of the Negro in the face of civilization.” (313) Though it is blacks whom he characterizes as having an “intuitive love of color” and “strong appetites,” (165) he is in fact stating a categorical preference.
     McKay sometimes sounds racially specific about this ability to lose oneself in the dance of life. “Negroes,” he says “are never so beautiful and magical as when they do that gorgeous sublimation of the primitive African sex feeling. In its thousand varied patterns, depending so much on individual rhythm, so little on formal movement, this dance is the key to the African rhythm of life . . . “ (105) Yet his claim is that through such harmonious participation one penetrates, not to an understanding of Africa alone, but to the very essence of reality. The most dramatic expression of his celebration of ecstatic experience is surely the lengthy scene that concludes Part I with a description of Banjo’s “orchestra” playing “Shake that Thing.” The passage mounts to a grand crescendo that concludes “eternal rhythm of the mysterious, magical, magnificent – the dance divine of life . . . Oh, Shake That Thing!” (58)
     One might speculate about the role McKay’s homosexuality played in this insistence on pleasure’s demands, but it could equally be linked to the “roaring twenties” ethos or even to his Communism, meant, after all, to provide the greatest well-being to all (though the Stalinists could not understand him). To me, neither a child of the new twentieth century nor gay nor an orthodox Communist, his attitude is reminiscent of the painfully lovely lyrics of John Keats who found refuge from a world of pain in the immediacy of his experience and in poetry that made his passionate subjectivity available to a world of fellow sufferers, a grand band of copains made up of all those making their way along this black earth.



1. The same distinction, familiar already from D. H. Lawrence and others, appears in the négritude poets who owed so much to McKay.

2. All life naturally and unreflectively avoid pain and seeks pleasure. In written sources, apart from scattered passages in Sumerian and Egyptian texts and the book of Ecclesiastes, the most systematic exponents of hedonism in antiquity were the Cyrenaics.


3. See, for instance, also passages beginning on pages 13, 52, 67, 86, 284, and 307.