Contronyms

     Contronyms, that is, words which are their own opposites, have been given such a rich variety of names that there can be no mistaking they engage the interest of those for whom words may be attractive playthings. They have been called contranyms, Janus words, auto-antonyms, autantonym, antagonyms, enantiodromes, self-antonyms, antilogies, or addad (Arabic, singular did). For all the Greek and Latin roots, these terms are recent. A great number of websites provide lists of such words.
     The range of names parallels the range of phenomena they describe; a variety of paths can end in a contronym. The purest form might be that in which two originally separate words developed identical forms, so that their opposition is in a way accidental. This is the case with cleave, for instance, with its meanings of “hold together” and “split apart” and let in the common sense of “allow” and the nearly obsolete one of “bar” or “prevent.” Such apparent self-contradiction is in fact a mere coincidence, words which look the same, but which turn out to have developed from entirely different etymological roots. The verbal usage of rock is derived from a Germanic word meaning “to yank or pull” while the noun is derived from a medieval Latin word for stone. Clip in the sense of cutting has a different root than clip in the sense of fasten together.
     Such accidental similarity is, of course, hardly confined to the realm of the lexicon. I know a poet named George Wallace who has very little in common with the one-time presidential aspirant with whom he shares a name. A ball bearing has the same shape but a different function than a child’s marble. Parallel evolution is familiar to biologists, for instance, in the development of similar animals – litopterns and horses, European and South American saber-toothed tigers, moles, and others -- among marsupial and placental groups since they diverged a hundred million years ago. In these cases, though, the similarity reflects a similar purpose, whereas the verbal appearance is identical but the function altogether different.
     Some contronyms are born of transactional words that indicate a relationship instead of a particular action. To consult, for instance, might mean either to seek or to give advice, and one who leases might be either a landlord or a tenant. In some languages the same word can be used for borrow or lend (e.g. German ausleihen), while In English etymologically guest and host are derived from the same word and simply happen to have developed distinct uses over time. Here the contradiction is resolved simply by defining the word as “to enter into a relationship” rather than to take a specific action. This process, too, has non-linguistic parallels. A merchant may be either buying or selling, and, if an individual is said to be “into sm,” it remains undetermined whether he or she favors the first or the second of those letters.
     A variety of other circumstances can also produce contronyms. Meaning, like plants, can form branches which grow independently. Fast, for instance, from a root meaning of “firm and solid,” acquired an intensive meaning that eventually developed into the more common modern definition “speedy,” in such usages as to run fast. In an analogous way outside the realm of words, the associations of tobacco have mutated from the original ceremonial and sacred uses through suggestions of sophistication and conviviality to the present connotations of addiction, illness, and death.
     However they arose, such words cast a light on the imprecision inherent in all signifying. A modern critic contemplating contronyms will think of Derrida and the recognition that meaning is “always already erased.” A polemicist could declare them the only honest words in that they admit their utter ambiguity.
     If one were to imagine an entire language made of such words, what would any utterance really mean?  Would all statements be substantially the same? Would every statement be both trivial and profoundly meaningful? Perhaps the linguistic system would then more closely mirror the subatomic realm in which positives and negatives balance and, in the end, cancel each other. It certainly seems as though matter and antimatter should also similarly balance, though at present physicists say they do not.
     Long before Deconstruction, the revelation of the limits of duality was common to many of the most lofty of thinkers. The old man Lao Zi was at home amid such cosmic speculations which seem indeterminate as they founder with the burden of vast implications. He repeatedly insisted “is and is-not come together.” Hard and easy, long and short, high and low, beauty and ugliness. (poem 2) ‘The heavy is foundation for the light. (26) “What is to be shrunken is first stretched out.” (36) “Bad fortune will promote the good.” (58) To have an original thought, one must not shrink from self-contradiction.
     The rishis who declared the Advaita revelation that the individual and the godhead are identical knew the explosive potential of paradox and mystery. Christ spoke in paradoxes. Nagarjuna saw in every statement its opposite. Blake wrote “Without contraries is no progression” and knew that body and soul were one.
     So it may happen (to the leximaniacal at any rate) that contronyms lift a bit of the curtain of maya, providing a glimpse beyond, a chance to see all things new. They remind one of how slippery the words that we use to package and contain our flowing perceptions bear no guarantee but their own unreliability. Reflecting on such words, if it provides little progress toward certainty, will perhaps remind the thinker of the unstable ground beneath everybody’s conceptual feet.

Harry McClintock and the Hobo Ethos

The texts of McClintock’s three songs, “The Bum Song,” “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,“ and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” are appended in the form in which he sang them in 1928. I have added as well The Little Red Songbook lyrics of “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” the words of Al Jolson’s version of the same song, and a field transcription of “The Apple-Knocker’s Lament” (a variant of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”).


     Hobos are, I suppose, very nearly obsolete nowadays, though the newspapers still sometimes refer to a crime suspect by the sinister name of “drifter,” glad perhaps to make it clear that he is not a local resident. The closest equivalent in America today is the homeless person, an apparition from whom many middle-class people shrink, as though misfortune might be contagious. Yet in the earlier twentieth century America’s cultural attitude toward hobos was more friendly, even at times admiring, and this sympathy was recorded in songs and stories.
     People had been ranging across the country in search of work ever since the construction of the railroads made free if hazardous travel an option. The population of internal migrants seeking work intensified after the demobilizations at the end of the Civil War. Estimates of the number of Americans forced on the road by poverty during the Great Depression range from one to two million, a good share of them children. During the thirties everyone was familiar with vagrants and beggars; their jungles were often large and well-established shantytowns. Enough people were traveling about to generate a culture of their own with laws, songs, and customary practices. Indeed, under the ironic name Tourist Union #63, hobos are reported to have held national conventions as early as 1889. [1]
     Perhaps the most dramatic sign of society’s sometime sympathy for hobos is the Chaplin tramp character which the comedian first assumed in Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914). Chaplin rapidly became the biggest star in Hollywood, celebrated around the world. Constantly struggling against bosses and police, Chaplin’s character clearly had a subversive edge to which audiences (and the government) responded. [2] Emmett Kelly conceived the idea of the hobo circus clown years before he realized the character in performance in the late thirties. [3] Apart from his work with Ringling Brothers, Kelly also appeared at the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ebbets Field as mascot of the “Bums.” [4]
     In general sympathetic attention to the poor takes the form of pity and indignation. But the ethos culturally constructed about the figure of the hobo was often positive. Hobos were seen as the embodiment of such American values as freedom and individualism, their lifestyle a matter of choice, not a cruel necessity of an unjust system. Thus, the first of the rules in the suspect document purporting to be the Hobo Ethical Code passed by the Tourist Union #63 in 1889 is sometimes printed as “Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.” [5]
     This attitude on the part of transients or of their admirers suggests at the same time a critique of accepted social values. The happy hobo, looking after himself alone, casts into question the stability and responsibility of the family man. The hobo’s willful refusal to pursue a career flouts the importance of the work ethic and the definition of success by income. More radically, it criticizes the relation of owner and worker under capitalism. The hobo has not “sold out,” and thus remains free of control by those with money.
     These themes are all present in the seminal works of the hobo ethos, a group of three songs recorded in 1928 by Harry McClintock. [6] McClintock, also known as “Haywire Mac” and “Radio Mac,” claimed to be the author as well as the performer of “The Bum Song,” “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” McClintock had earned his bona fides as a bum with years of migrant labor as well as activism in the I.W.W., the only left group that sought to organize the homeless proletariat. In the late 1920s he recorded a number of tunes, a mixture of his own compositions, folk, and popular songs including three that were instrumental in shaping the hobo ethos: “The Bum Song,” “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
     “The Bum Song” was popular enough in 1928 that, following McClintock’s release, it was covered that same year by at least six other artists. [7] The song accurately reflects its author’s heroic range. He is truly an epitome of America both geographically and in terms of work experience. “I beat my way from Frisco Bay to the rockbound coast of Maine/ To Canada and Mexico, then wandered back again.” He describes run-ins with police and railroad bulls and rejection by housewives, yet his spirit is irrepressible. His “troubles pale” when he “hit[s] the trail.” Turning down jobs that do not appeal to him, he enjoys a grand camaraderie with others on the road. “For we are three bums, three jolly old bums, we live like royal Turks/ We have good luck in bummin' our chuck and we never bother to work.” The type of hobo as happy wanderer, here on the grandest of scales, coast to coast, surviving risky encounters and making his way by his wits, is here clearly established.
     While the persona of the “Bum Song” lists a range of employment that reflects McClintock’s own, in a hint of the revolutionary potential of the hobo ethos, it also includes one incident of his refusing work when offered inadequate wages. The element of social protest is far from incidental for McClintock. He was a lifelong member of the revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist union the I.W.W. and edited their Little Red Songbook (1909) which included an agit-prop version of “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” blaming “the boss” for poverty and envisioning a time when “I get all the money I earn,/ The boss will be broke, and to work he must turn.” Yet the notion of a hobo by choice, happily embracing a free lifestyle, persists in the very title and chorus as well as in the verse “when springtime it comes, oh, won't we have fun;/ We'll throw off our jobs, and go on the bum.”
     In the version of “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” McClintock recorded in 1928 the radical content has become comparatively inconspicuous. What had been the opening challenge “How the hell can I work when there's no work to do?” has slipped down to the sixth verse and the vision of a better future is absent altogether. Instead of criticizing capitalism for the misery it produces, the hobo here delights in his chosen lifestyle. “Rejoice and be glad for the Springtime has come/ We can throw down our shovels and go on the bum.” While the lines protesting low wages remain “Why don't you save all the money you earn/ If I didn't eat, I'd have money to burn,” the recorded song concludes by blaming the hobo himself for his poverty: “I don't like work and work don't like me/ And that is the reason I am so hungry.”
     Again, the song was so popular that other versions appeared by at least seven artists followed a few years later by a movie of the same name. [8] Each of these emphasized the joy and independence of the hobo life, yet retained a remnant of social critique in the simple rebellion against the routine of work and the lure of that vestige of the American frontier, the open road.
     McClintock’s third contribution to the hobo ethos, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” is at once the most famous of his tunes and in a sense the least understood. The song was recorded many times and topped the Billboard country chart for a time in 1939 in a yodeling rendition by Robert “Tex” Morton. Generally (as in versions by Bing Crosby, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, or the New Christy Minstrels) the song is a high-spirited wish-fulfilment, its comedy heightened in the semi-authentic renderings by the combination of infantile raw appetite with tastes that run to cigarettes and whiskey. The point is further highlighted by the attractions of not only blind railroad bulls, but also open-door jails, and -- best of all -- you never have to change your socks. The linkage of the desires of an eight-year-old with those of an adult is an entertaining twist on the theme of transient as free man.
     This combination is notably more sinister in light of what McClintock claimed to be the original narrative in which the song is a dramatic moment. When he sued to establish his ownership of the song’s copyright, as part of his evidence McClintock quoted lyrics that he had not recorded.


The punk rolled up his big blue eyes
And said to the jocker, "Sandy,
I've hiked and hiked and wandered too,
But I ain't seen any candy.
I've hiked and hiked till my feet are sore
And I'll be damned if I hike any more
To be buggered sore like a hobo's whore
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains."


The beguiling picture of a land of plenty is then in reality part of a campaign by an older tramp (the jocker) to seduce a young man (the punk). [9] The validity of this view of the song is attested not only by its author but also by other versions including similar sexual language which have been collected by folklorists, both as “The Big Rick Candy Mountain” and as “The Apple-Knocker’s Lament.” In addition, there is ample testimony concerning such predatory relationships from others who spent time on the road beginning with Josiah Flynt, similar to those reported. The song, then, was an in-joke, a hobo’s satiric picture of one type among their number, making his pitch as what some have called a situational homosexual, such as those sometimes found in prisons and on shipboard.
     This treatment of the joys of hobo life not as the choice of a free spirit but rather as a cynical fraud designed to take advantage of naïve youth is a salutary reminder of the actual rigors of homelessness. In fact, make-do sexual arrangements, sometimes involving coercion, while ugly, were hardly more so than the filth, disease, hunger, and danger tramps faced daily.
     For the citizen to whom the hobo is totally Other, he must be either the object of social work and charity or the outcast semi-criminal, yet, at a time when many people felt themselves little above the status of transient workers, these identities played little role in popular culture’s view of such men. The hobo ethos in America has instead two somewhat contradictory elements. On the one hand, the hobo is an emblem of the free man, unattached to job or family, glorying in his autonomy and philosophically scornful of worldly goods. As such he approaches other bohemian ideals, appealing to the romantic impulses of those with more constraining responsibilities, yet attracting as well some who actually lived rough. On the other, he is the victim of selfish capitalists who keep for themselves far more than they can enjoy while others, such as the hobo, must do without. He must suffer hunger, uncertainty, cold, and legal jeopardy while he wishes only for a job that pays a living wage. Here the hobo is the vanguard of the working class whose life clarifies the system that dominates his steady-working brother as well. Somewhere behind both the popular images of the celebrating hobo and the protesting hobo one may seek the nitty-gritty real hobo enduring privations and ignominy, indeed, often risking his freedom and his very life in a struggle for survival that had to be renewed daily.



1. The story is that men with union cards were sometimes treated more decently than others by law enforcement officers who might consider them more likely honest working men. I have found varying facts and little documentary evidence for the hobo organization during the nineteenth century. After the affiliation with the town of Britt, Iowa, which continues to host hobo conventions today, the record is clearer.

2. Chaplin had applauded the Russian Revolution and later wrote admiring accounts of Soviet society. He had been a fellow traveler, closely observed by the F.B.I., for many years before he was blacklisted as a Communist in 1948.

3. Among the most familiar hobo clown performers since are Don Burda’s Homer and Red Skelton's "Freddy the Freeloader." A sort of epigone of the genre is Jackie Gleason’s role in Gigot, directed by Gene Kelly, a sentimental and pretentious fable considered by its star (who had conceived the project) to be great art.

4. The bum nickname originated with a cartoon by Willard Mullin of the New York World Telegram in 1939. The romance of the road was already subject to ironic treatment by 1941 when Preston Sturges made Sullivan’s Travels. Among the belated cultural vestiges of the heroic hobo is Chaplin’s Limelight (1952) in which he plays a tramp comedian. In 1965 Roger Miller had a hit with his “King of the Road.” Even later John Prine’s “The Hobo” (1978), later covered by Johnny Cash, asks where have the hobos gone, lamenting their disappearance as a loss of freedom. Tom Waites and Bob Dylan have both cultivated a hobo history.

5. There are varying texts, usually claiming that the rules were passed in 1889 in St. Louis. I have not seen any documentary evidence supporting these details. The popularity of the rules and their proliferation online makes the investigator suspicious. The existence of hobo courts to which the code makes reference is confirmed by some testimony, irregular and even exceptional as such proceedings may have been. I suspect that the elaborate system of hieroglyphic signs by which hobos are said to have communicated with each other, while it may contain a seed of truth, is largely journalistic invention.

6. in an extraordinary career, McClintock, called “Haywire Mac,” exemplified the itinerant worker. He not only recorded a number of classic American roots songs; he also worked as a miner, on the railroad, as a cowboy, in a circus, as a sailor and in China and the Philippines during wartime. There is some doubt about the extent of McClintock’s originality in these songs, portions of which may have been circulating orally before his versions.

7. Frank Luther, “Lazy" Larry (Frank Marvin), Vernon Dalhart (Marion Try Slaughter), Eddie Kirk (Ed Kirkeby), Jack Kaufman, and "Hobo" Jack Turner (Ernest Hare).

8. Vernon Dalhart, Al Jolson, Jack Kaufman, Frank Luther, Hobo Jack Turner, and Pete Wiggins 1928. In 1933 Lewis Milestone made a film called Hallelujah, I’m a Bum written by Ben Hecht and S. N. Behrman with Al Jolson in which the star sang the song. Doubtless due to the movie, the song enjoyed a revival and a number of recordings by various artists that year. The Al Jolson revision includes topical references to John D. Rockefeller and to Chevrolet and the simile “the moon’s your chandelier” clearly originating in Tin Pan Alley.

9. References in fact predate Flynt’s full discussion in his 1899 volume Tramping with Tramps. Nels Anderson, the leading early sociologist studying hobos says flatly “all studies indicate that homosexual practices among homeless men are widespread.” (The Hobo: the Sociology of the Homeless Man, 1923). Most writers who actually rode the rails, including Hemingway and London, reported scenes of pedophilia and sexual aggression. Finally, rule 13 of the Hobo Code of Conduct reads “Do not allow other hobos to molest children; expose all molesters to authorities…they are the worst garbage to infest any society.”




“The Bum Song” Harry McClintock

Come all you jolly jokers and listen while I hum
A story I'll relate to you of the great American bum
>From the east to west, the north to south, like a swarm of bees they come
They sleep in the dirt and wear a shirt that's dirty and full of crumbs

Oh, it's early in the morning and the dew is off the ground
The bum arises from his nest and gazes all around
>From the boxcar and the haystack he gazes ev'rywhere
He never turns back upon his tracks until he gets a square

I beat my way from Frisco Bay to the rockbound coast of Maine
To Canada and Mexico, then wandered back again
I've met town clowns and harnessed bulls as tough as a cop could be
And I've been in ev'ry calaboose in this land of liberty

I've topped the spruce and worked the sluice and taken a turn at the plough
I've searched for gold in the rain and cold and worked on a river scow
I've dug the clam and built the dam and packed the elusive prune
But my troubles pale when I hit the trail a-packin' my old balloon

Oh, standin' in the railroad yards awaitin' for a train
Waitin' for a westbound freight, but think it's all in vain
Goin' east they're loaded, goin' west sealed tight
I think we'll have to get aboard the fast express tonight

Oh, lady, would you be kind enough to give me something to eat
A piece of bread and butter and a ten foot slice of meat
A piece of pie or custard to tickle me appetite
But really I'm so hungry, I don't know where to sleep tonight

SPOKEN:
BUM: Good morning, mum
LADY: Good morning, bum
BUM: I just got in
LADY: Yes, well you can just get out again
BUM: But lady, I'm trav'lin'
LADY: Well, keep right on travellin', who's keepin' ya?
BUM: Honest, mum, I don't know where me next meal is comin'
LADY: And did ya think this was an information bureau?
BUM: Lady, haven't you a bite to eat in the house?
LADY: I have that, and a six foot Irishman comin' home at five o'clock to eat it. On your way now.
BUM: All right. Goodbye, mum.
LADY: Goodbye, bum.

Oh, sleeping against the station, tra-la-la-la-la-lation
That's our recommendation, hurrah-herree-harrum
For we are three bums, three jolly old bums, we live like royal Turks
We have good luck in bummin' our chuck and we never bother to work

I met a man the other day I never had met before
He asked me if I wanted a job shovellin' iron ore
I asked him what the wages were and he said, "Ten cents a ton"
I said, "Old fellah, go chase yourself, I'd rather be on the bum"

Oh, sleeping in the pokies, oggie-oggie-oggies
Smokin' snipes and stogies, hurrah-herree-herrum
For we are three bums, three jolly old bums, we live like royal Turks
We have good luck in bummin' our chuck, God bless the man that works



“Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” Harry McClintock 1909 Little Red Songbook version

Why don't you work like other folks do?
How the hell can I work when there's no work to do?
Refrain
Hallelujah, I'm a bum,
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah, give us a handout
To revive us again.
Oh, why don't you save all the money you earn?
If I didn't eat, I'd have money to burn.
Whenever I get all the money I earn,
The boss will be broke, and to work he must turn.
Oh, I like my boss, he's a good friend of mine,
That's why I am starving out on the bread line.
When springtime it comes, oh, won't we have fun;
We'll throw off our jobs, and go on the bum.



“Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” Harry McClintock recorded version

Rejoice and be glad for the Springtime has come
We can throw down our shovels and go on the bum
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

The Springtime has come and I'm just out of jail
Without any money, without any bail
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

I went to a house and I rapped on the door
And the lady says, "Bum, bum, you've been here before"
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

I like Jim Hill, he's a good friend of mine
That is why I am hiking down Jim Hill's main line
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

I went to a house and I asked for some bread
And the lady says, "Bum, bum, the baker is dead"
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

Why don't you work like other men do
Now, how can I work when there's no work to do
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

Why don't you save all the money you earn
If I didn't eat, I'd have money to burn
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again

I don't like work and work don't like me
And that is the reason I am so hungry
Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again
Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again



Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” Al Jolson version

Rockefeller's busy giving dough away;
Chevrolet is busy making cars;
Hobo, you keep busy when they throw away
Slightly used cigars.
Hobo, you've no time to shirk.
You're busy keeping far away from work.
The weather' s getting fine.
The coffee tastes like wine.
You happy hobo, sing,
"Hallelujah, I'm a bum again!"
Why work away for wealth
When you can travel for your health?
It' s spring, you hobo, sing,
"Hallelujah, I'm a bum again!"
Your home is always near.
The moon's your chandelier;
Your ceiling is the sky,
Way up high.
The road is your estate,
The earth your little dinner plate;
It's spring, you hobo, sing,
"Hallelujah, I'm a bum again!"

Why don't you work like other folks do?
How the hell can I work when there's no work to do?
[ALTERNATE LAST LINES: How the hell can I work when the sky is so blue?
OR: How can I get a job when you're holding down two?]
CHORUS:
Hallelujah, I'm a bum,
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah, give us a handout
To revive us again.
Oh, why don't you save all the money you earn?
If I didn't eat, I'd have money to burn.
Whenever I get all the money I earn,
The boss will be broke, and to work he must turn.
Oh, I like my boss, he's a good friend of mine,
That's why I am starving out on the breadline.
When springtime it comes, oh, won't we have fun;
We'll throw off our jobs, and go on the bum.



The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Harry McClintock

One evening as the sun went down
And the jungle fires were burning,
Down the track came a hobo hiking,
And he said, "Boys, I'm not turning
I'm headed for a land that's far away
Besides the crystal fountains
So come with me, we'll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountains

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There's a land that's fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night.
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
And the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers' trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I'm bound to go
Where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall
The winds don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railway bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew
And of whiskey too
You can paddle all around it
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
The jails are made of tin.
And you can walk right out again,
As soon as you are in.
There ain't no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws nor picks,
I'm bound to stay
Where you sleep all day,
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
....
I'll see you all this coming fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains



The Big Rock Candy Mountain (3) The Apple-knocker’s Lament

On a very fine day in the month of May
A great big bum (big burly) came hiking
And he seated his pratt (himself) 'neath a big green tree
Which was very much to his liking.

On the very same day in the month of May
A farmer's lad came hiking.
Said the bum to the son, "If you will come,
I'll show you some sights to your liking.

"I'll show you the bees in the cigarette trees,
The big rock candy mountains,
The chocolate heights where they give away kites
And the sody-water fountains.

"The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
The marbles made of crystal.
We'll join the band of Dangerous Dan
Who carries a sword and a pistol."

So the bum set out with the lad at his back.
For six long months they travelled,
Then the boy came back on the very same track
And this (sad) tale (he) unravelled.

"There are no bees in the cigarette trees,
No big rock candy mountains,
No chocolate heights where they give away kites,
Or sody-water fountains.

"No lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
No marble made of crystal.
There is no such man as Dangerous Dan
Who carries a sword and a pistol.

"He made me beg and steal his eggs (sit on his peg)
And he called me his jocker.
When I didn't get pies he blacked my eyes
And called me his apple-knocker.

"No more I'll roam from my very fine home.
I'll save my junkerino.
You can bet your lid that this old kid
Won't be no one else's punkerino."

note: A typescript copy of this is No. 377 in the Robert C. Gordon
Inferno in the Library of Congress, sent to Gordon by Wheaton
H. "Skin" Brewer of Lebanon, Oregon, in 1927 under the title of
"The Appleknocker's Lament."

A Second Look into Northanger Abbey

References in parentheses are to chapters; those in brackets are endnotes.


This is, I believe, an authentic second look, though the first would have contained little to detain the reader.  In the front of my Dolphin paperback, at the age of sixteen, I scrawled “key to understanding the text – page 110” where the underlined passage has Isabella declaring, “But this is idle talking!”  I recall in that period mentioning Austen as an author whose value I could better recognize than appreciate. This callow judgment was doubtless due to simple gender identification – her heroines tend to be young ladies who, when not discussing their frocks or their hair, consider marriage candidates, often favoring those blessed with a becoming measure of wealth.  This time round I aspire to a considerably more specific (if not particularly novel) evaluation which turns out to be considerably more positive as well.  At the time of that first reading I was not far from the age of Catherine Morland and likely had more in common with her than I suspected.


     Northanger Abbey is a delight, brief, with a frothy little plot featuring an impossibly ingenuous ingénue and a somewhat wiser but no less unspoiled male lead. It scintillates with wit and the elaborate circumlocutions that ornamented polite conversations of the time. If the narrative movement is slow and a bit repetitive during the Bath chapters and then too swiftly finds a felicitous denouement in the end, the reader is too charmed by the characters and amused by the artificiality of their language to complain.

     The characters’ personalities are expressed verbally not only in what say, but notably in their taste in fiction. Indeed, the simplest way to characterize Austen’s Northanger Abbey is as a satire on the fashion for Gothic novels and so it is. Yet the trajectory of plot has only a limited link to this theme. In the tale of Catherine’s coming of age, her passing from girl to wife, her literary taste forms only a part, and in the depiction of a hypocritical and often selfish beau monde, novel-reading is a venial charge. Far from betraying a lack of unity – which might be unsurprising in a first novel – the reading of books is skillfully linked in the narrative to the reading of everyday life. Decoding the treatment of experience in works of art turns out to be little different from processing one’s sense impressions, themselves signs of reality. Discernment based on experience is critical to both.

     Austen does not merely satirize the fashion for Gothic novels. She satirizes as well her own novelistic practices in ways that often suggest an ironic use of her own narrative voice, thus generating a series of points of view: that of the popular novelist, that of the typical reader, that of her own persona, and that that is implied to be her own. She had described Catherine at the outset as an unlikely heroine and later, in one of her recurrent self-reflective passages (V) she points to one point of difference between the novelistic heroine and their representative in the young Miss Morland. With a gay play of wit, she notes in her novel with a novel-reading heroine, that people in novels do not read novels.

     Throughout the book, sometimes within a single paragraph or sentence, the view of fiction oscillates, often to the point of ambiguity. In the first place, novels must surely be good because, after all, the writer is writing and the reader reading a novel. After both actively assenting to the value of stories in practice, it would be odd if they were to condemn them in theory.

     Yet the very first sentence problematizes the appreciation of novels. By indicating that Catherine is far from a conventional heroine, Austen implies a conservable gap between fiction and reality. The implication is that Catherine is a more or less ordinary, if exemplary, specimen of (seventeen-year-old) womanhood and that the Gothic authors are spinners of fantasies. The implausibility of the plots dreamed up by Mrs. Radcliffe and others is indeed the source of much of the comedy of Northanger Abbey.

     Yet it is true that Austen repeatedly ridicules the melodramatic conventions of the Gothic novel. She is most ridiculous when imagining melodramatic goings-on in the abbey. Her investigation of the bureau in her room which turns out to contain nothing more than a batch of old laundry receipts causes her to scold herself for her imagination, yet she goes on to look into Mrs. Tilney’s old room, thinking her perhaps dead or imprisoned only to be embarrassed by her discovery by Henry who guesses at her speculations.

     Why then do people read novels, is they care so misleading about lived experience? For the Gothic vogue, Austen is clear enough. Isabella as a woman of fashion is up on all the novels, and when she provides her new friend with a reading list, Catherine asks, “Are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?” (VI) The sensation, the “horridness,” of the plots with their mysterious un-English settings and their supernatural accoutrements, heightened by suspense, is their reason for being.

     The thrill of crime fiction, which flourishes yet today, is the basis for a bit of comic business when Catherine “solemnly” “something very shocking will soon come out in England.” (XIV) “Startled,” Eleanor Tilney asks for details and is not reassured when Catherine assures her that the affair “will be more horrible than anything we have met with yet,” “uncommonly dreadful,” with “murder and everything of the kind.” It turns out she is talking of “a new publication . . . in three duodecimo volumes.”

     A further defense of fiction may be inferred from its partisans. Henry Tilney, who is charming to a fault, surprises Catherine by identifying himself as a novel reader and declaring, that anyone not susceptible to the pleasure in a good novel must be “intolerably stupid.” (XIV) as evidenced he recalls reading Udolpho aloud with his sister and plunging to the end while she wrote a note. He is impelled by irresistible desire. “I am proud when I reflect on it, and I think it must establish me in your good opinion.” He suggests here that familiarity with literature is likely to make a person more moral and that a man of sensibility, receptive to the play of emotions offered by fiction, is likely to be sympathetic, altruistic, and indeed moral in lived experience.

     From his first introduction James Thorpe exhibits fatuous, self-interested behavior. When Catherine asks him if he has read Udolpho, he replies, “Oh, Lord! not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.” This does not preclude his saying he might go in for an “amusing” story, something with “fun and nature.” Then in a turn of incidental wit, Austen has him condemn Burney’s Camilla as “the horridest nonsense.”) (VII) [2] In a reversal of Henry’s emotional sensibility, James Thorpe is incapable of imagining the feeling s of another person either on the page or across the room.

     The case of General Tilney illuminates Austen’s model for novel-reading that enriches rather than misleads the reader’s view of the world. Though Catherine’s suspicions that the general has killed or imprisoned his wife are fantasies, grounded in melodramatic fiction, he turns out to be a monster of greed and rudeness in fact. The story-teller tells the truth, but indirectly, by implication, using refraction. Just as Catherine had taken everyone at their word, unable to conceive of mendacious or wicked people, she likewise took her the narratives of Mrs. Radcliffe and others literally. When she enters a genuine abbey, its renovations do not correspond to her expectations, but its halls turn out to hold the potential for drama and romance all the same.

     Not only can literary texts benefit from such interpretation. Many experiences of everyday life require analogous decoding, even if here the “everyday life” is itself contained on a page of a novel, suggesting an infinite regression of symbolic forms. Signs seem always to refer to other signs and the observer must manage their implications in a consistently provisional way. Thus Henry amuses himself by playing the pedagogue with Catherine (XIV), insisting on the older meaning for the word “nice.” Eleanor and the reader know that he only seems to be making a philological distinction; in reality he is flirting with Catherine. [1] Similarly, when they are about to arrive at Northanger Abbey and Henry spins out a playful Gothic pastiche description of his home, his goal is not to provide information about the abbey’s real characteristics, but rather to tease the ingenuous Miss Morland. (XX)

     These experiences, compounded with what she has seen in the public rooms of Bath to make her doubt Isabella’s sincerity and good nature, including her dalliance with Captain Tilney , lead Catherine to a more nuanced view of both spoken and written “truth.” What people say may not be literally true, yet it is not random either, but rather deeply meaningful in novels and life alike. Such correspondences between signifier and signified typify all story from the myth of Oedipus to one’s memory of this morning’s breakfast.

     All experiences, however, are not equally meaningful. For Austen novels situated between the dryasdust pedantry of a history of England (which lacks any entertainment value) and the “coarse” popular journalism of the Spectator (which lacks meaning). Ideally in fiction one may find “work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” (V)

     This stirring encomium for literature was doubtless based on the traditional Horatian formula according to which poetry or imaginative literature in general is expected to teach and delight. The thrills of horror and suspense are what attract the reader to the deeper knowledge of human nature that comes through a wide experience either in books or in drawing rooms. Neither heroines from books nor acquaintances from the Pump Room are to be taken at face value. Lacking this refracted reading, both literature and last night’s chitchat are indeed nothing but “idle talking.”



1. Similarly, in X Henry playfully constructs an analogy between dance partners and marriage partners. Considering Catherine’s naiveté he seems to be entertaining primarily himself. Henry, though uniformly civil, hardly exhibits the passion often expected of a male lead. His marriage seems occasioned more than anything by his wish to redeem his father’s rudeness. If there is never anything to dislike about him, he seems also to have little romantic enthusiasm.

2. The word “horrid” seems to have been enjoying a vogue at the time. See, for instance Isabella’s exclaiming “horrid!” in X.

Rereading the Classics [Rochester]

I quote from The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth ( New Haven: Yale, 1968). Vieth modernizes spelling and punctuation for reasons that to me are unconvincing but that pose no problems for the understanding of the texts.


     The work of James Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, is perhaps less well-known than his reputation. This is unsurprising for an individual for whom, as for Wilde, life was itself a work of art. In his own day, while his poetry was highly regarded, his behavior attracted even more attention. He was on the one hand an exemplary wit whose company, even in his youth, delighted Charles II and those about him with his ability to extemporaneously compose ironic comment on courtly life even as it unfolded. At the same time, even in the licentious context of Restoration mores, he was considered a notorious rakehell who engaged in scandalous and riotous behavior time and again. A confessed libertine and likely atheist who experienced an apparent deathbed conversion, he was posthumously again an exemplary figure, though of an altogether different sort than he had been at the outset of his brief and spectacular career.
     In spite of the occasional character of much of his verse and the fact that it was circulated largely in manuscript, he was highly regarded in his own day. Marvell according to Aubrey “was wont to call him the best English satyrist,” and, though they later fell out [1], Dryden dedicated Marriage à l la Mode to Rochester in the most fulsome terms, referring to himself as the nobler man’s “slave” and thanking him for assistance in the play’s composition, suggesting further that Rochester could far outdo him in playwriting. Dryden describes himself as “of an inferior wit and quality to you” and lauds “the excellency of your natural parts.”
     Dr. Johnson in the following century is torn between acknowledging the excellence of his writing and denouncing the immorality – worse, the blasphemy – of his views. Though his writing displays “genius” and “splendor,” according to Johnson, he was led by “dissolute and vitious company” into corruption and depravity. Constrained by these extra-literary considerations, Johnson balances his every comment. Rochester, he says, had “an active and inquisitive mind” and had a reputation as “the greatest scholar of all the nobility,” but only when he was not in the throes of one of “his paroxysms of intemperance.” His writing Johnson finds “smooth and easy,” exhibiting “sprightliness and vigour” though his achievement is circumscribed by his “ostentatious contempt of regularity.” “In all his works, Johnson concludes, “may be found tokens of a mind, which study might have carried to excellence.” [2]
     The same tokens of ambivalence persist in the rhetoric of Hazlitt’s discussion of Rochester whose work he characterizes as “the poetry of wit combined with the love of pleasure, of thought with licentiousness.” Finding in the poet “passionate enthusiasm” and even a sort of “sublimity,” he attributes this afflatus to the “extravagant heedless levity” reflecting a “contempt for everything that others respect.” Hazlitt does allow that “his epigrams were the bitterest, the least laboured, and the truest, that ever were written” and, in the wary tones of one risking approval of a monster, allows that “his poem upon Nothing is itself no trifling work.” [3]
     It is worth noting, perhaps, that, though we may have shed much of the prescriptive morality and insistent orthodoxy that was meaningful to Dr. Johnson, even a twenty-first century judge is likely to find Rochester a bit of a rotter. We can perhaps accept his advocacy of free love, but we are likely to grimace when he goes on to encourage incest and confess rape. The question of whether he was being candid or merely provocative is fortunately irrelevant as the issue of whether Rochester was a good man is entirely separate from that of his value as a writer.
     He compels our attention because, apart from composing the most scabrous poems of his era, he wrote epigrams as good as Jonson’s, songs as light as Herrick’s, philosophical and satirical poems to rival Swift or Pope, and a few love elegies as tender as Cowley or Donne as well.
     The issue of obscenity might well be treated first with the intention that it detract as little as possible from other inquiries. Rochester had a double motive for his vernacular and explicit sexual themes. First, to him the imperatives of eros were so powerful that he felt compelled to use the strongest possible language to accurately portray his experience. Equally significant was the use of transgressive language to strike a generally counter-cultural stance, odd though the term may seem when describing a courtier enjoying the confidence of the crown. Breaking with the conventions of his day not in morality alone, but also in philosophy and religion, Rochester found the aggressive language of obscenity a powerful signifier of his dissent.
     Still, the reader of his most infamous composition Sodom is likely to find it tiresome once past the amusement of noting which vulgar terms have survived the centuries and which have vanished entirely has subsided. The best one can say of Sodom is that it is less obsessive than de Sade and less mechanical than Aretino. Turns of wit here and there keep the reader going, but it is not surprising that the play has only been performed only a very few times. [4]
     The “Song” beginning “My dear mistress has a heart” is an early piece, melodious enough for a musical setting with a texture of complaint and paradox familiar from many courtly love poems. The poet is the mistress’ slave, his love-service captured through her eyes, yet she remains in the verse’s alternately extreme and tender language “wild, and apt to wander.” Fearing separation, which apparently has not even occurred, he appreciates his own love-intoxication the more, feeling “melting joys,” and “killing pleasures, wounding blisses.” His compliments are grandly hyperbolic: angels listen when she speaks,” and she is “all mankind’s wonder.” Only in the quiet violence of the language – words like “wild,” “killing,” and “wounding” are used – does Rochester betray the intensity of his passion.
     A number of other songs combine courtly elements with their antithesis, a deflating comic physicality bearing hints of vulnerability, mortality, and despair. The fact that pastoral heroines were rural does not lessen the surprise of an opening line like “Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay.” More shockingly, while pastourelles sometimes described what looks very much like rape, the treatment was typically aestheticized, artificial, and muted. Rochester is willfully outlandish. Roused to “rescue your bosom pig from fate” at the Freudian entrance to Flora’s cave, Chloris is graphically taken: “Now piercéd is her virgin zone.” Unsatisfied with this lurid account, the poet pushes his possibilities. Chloris wakes to find that her rape was a dream. Aroused, she masturbates and at the end with “her own thumb between her legs,/ She’s innocent and pleased.” Lying among the grunting animals, she finds that sexual satisfaction has restored a sort of Edenic purity and joy. Rochester has shamelessly repackaged sexual assault as a female fantasy. If we are disturbed, we are likely responding as the author wished.
     The poet excelled in epigrammatic improvisations, virtually all of which are sharply satiric .[5] He ridicules the translators of the Psalms in “Spoken Extempore to a Country Clerk after Having Hears Him Sing Psalms,” Louis XIV in “Impromptu on Louis XIV,” Charles’s mistresses in “On Cary Frazier,” and “On Mrs. Willis,” and the king himself in the “Impromptu on Charles II” that says the king “never said a foolish thing,/ Nor ever did a wise one.” Often by implication, and explicitly in “Rochester Extempore,” he includes himself as a target, declaring himself a “rascal.”
     Among the best of Rochester’s longer satirical pieces is “A Ramble in St. James’s Park,” a location which, the poet says, while St. James “has the honor on’t,” “tis consecrate to prick and cunt.” The landscape is dream-like: “rows of mandrakes tall did rise,/ Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies.” As though in a seventies bathhouse, he describes dark figures representing all levels of society passing intent on sexual encounters. Suddenly he sees his beloved Corinna cruising, receptive to the advances of three men at once. Claiming that he is indifferent to her seeking sexual pleasure but only disapproves of her becoming “a passive pot for men to spend in” and wishes she would seek out a worthier replacement for him. He concludes by cursing her in words of disgusted vituperation: “May stinking vapors choke your womb.”
     “Tunbridge Wells” is equally fierce and more universal in its indictment finding of man that “in all his shapes he is ridiculous” with our vaunted reason in fact “humanity’s worst disease.” In contrast the author’s horse “doing things fit for his nature,/ Did seem to me by far the wiser creature.” Among his other longer comic pieces “Signior Dildo” is outstanding for its sustained wit, developing one variation after another of the ladies’ affection for the eponymous object.
     “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind” was probably Rochester’s most widely circulated poem during his lifetime and it has maintained its prominence perhaps because of its weight and wit, but its ambitious and provocative title is sufficiently intriguing to attract attention. As the skill of manipulating symbols is the definitive characteristic of humanity the poem promises to condemn itself doubly. A man attacking mankind, using reasons to condemn reason promises to be an ingenious paradox, if nothing else, though wit and not logic is the real attraction. After parenthetically identifying himself as “one of those strange, prodigious creatures, man,” he supports both adjectives by saying he would prefer to be anything but a man. It is certainly odd to reject oneself, yet the very seriousness, the honesty, even, of the impulse is an impressive assumption of responsibility, even noble.
     In heroic couplets, carved as though of stone, yet sounding like the table talk of a raconteur, Rochester places himself squarely among the skeptics by describing reason as an illusion, in one of the poem’s memorable metaphors, an “ignis fatuus” of the mind. This false light leads the persona through “error’s fenny bogs” only to come at last to the indeterminacy of “doubt’s boundless sea” where he paddles about until defeated by mortality, finally realizing that “all his life he has been in the wrong,” and that “his wisdom did his happiness destroy.” “Wit” (meaning not cleverness but ratiocination) turns out to have been a mere “frivolous pretence.”
     Should a stern superego, with “some formal band and beard,” scold him with pious commonplaces, arguing that man’s reason is evidence of divinity, giving “the world true grounds of hope and fear,” Rochester responds that it is specifically this delusion that he “despise[s],” , that “each heavy sot can pierce/ The limits of the boundless universe.” Though one would expect Rochester the skeptic to be very close to cynicism, he makes Diogenes the image of a fool, taking to his tub and to asceticism. The only person who would spend his time in thought must surely be he who has “nought to do.”
     In fact the sole use of thought is to determine action, and “our sphere of action is life’s happiness,/ And he who thinks beyond, thinks like an ass.” On the other hand, reason employed to make choices based on sense impressions is useful, “right reason.” Humankind, however, remains for him detestable, far less efficient than beasts at knowing and attaining their proper ends. Humans are perverse, vicious for no good reason, excelling only at “wantonness.”
     The evils of people arise out of their fear and confusion, a thought in curious harmony with Buddhist ethics, though Rochester goes on to declare that, in this moral wasteland, one has no choice but to be unscrupulous. “Men must be knaves, ‘tis in their own defence;” therefore, life amounts to a grand competition to be “the greatest knave.”
     The poem concludes with a final turn of wit. There is unlikely to be a single exception to the rule that people act out of fear and ignorance. Every individual in court is jostling for personal advantage, and every churchman a hypocrite. Should there, however, be such a prodigy as an honest man, it would be the exception that proves the rule, demonstrating only that “man differs more from man, than man from beast.”
     Even more metaphysically daring, “Upon Nothing” [6] begins with familiar notions but builds into a grand contemplation of its extraordinary subject, interrogating every duality in the height of the empyrean before returning to the phenomenal world in a satiric conclusion. The triplets of the verse generally present a problem in the first two lines, resolved in the third, while the consistent rhyme in each stanza reinforces the sense of order, of something within nothing.
     The opening stanza names the topic and implies the motive for the inquiry by noting that only nothing is “not afraid” of mortality. The next triplet paraphrases the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, saying “all proceeded from a great united What.” His customary ambivalence toward the world of lived experience is evident in his rather Gnostic reference to matter as “the wicked’st offspring of thy race.” He suggests that in the mystery of nothingness “the truth in private lies.” People are “blind” before the “great Negative.”
     Here he engages the heart of duality.


Is, or Is Not, the two great ends of Fate,
And True or False, the subject of debate,
That perfect or destroy the vast designs of state—


     In his third line, as though triggered by the word debate (and Rochester did take part in debates in the House of Lords), his philosophic superstructure gives way and, from questioning the nature of reality, he satisfies himself with the simpler task of making fun of Parliament. This social critique then expands to cover governments and nobility more generally and to touch on a series of national stereotypes before equating gratitude, kings’ promises, and whores’ vows all as equally empty. [7] It is as though the text dramatically enacts before the reader’s eyes the dizzying unsustainable heights of skepticism only to take refuge the easier targets available on every side in a fallen world.
     “The Mistress” strikes me as wholly earnest, a love poem to set beside Propertius and Tibullus, suggesting no shock but rather tender, attached, slightly melancholy reflection. The opening indicates the equally irresistible power of love and the passage of time.


An age in her embraces passed
Would seem a winter’s day,
Where life and love with envious haste
Are torn and snatched away


     The joys of his mistress are clearly ambivalent: his soul is “the living tomb” of love, “lovesick,” he feels her “wounding eyes.” He and she “sigh and lament, com plain and grieve.” Their passion is invested in “fantastic fancies,” and “frail joys;” he is in a sense dead, “:no more a soul, but shade.” The conclusion is one of these “fancies,” as the poet hopes for an affection “fixed and dear” “to make us blest at last.” To him his agony is nothing but “love raised to an extreme.” He hopes yet to be “blest at last,” to experience a felicity which can only arrive with love, but which seems always in practice elusive.
     The hedonist Rochester, in search of the highest pleasure, the perfect orgasm, the most ravishing beauty, writes most commonly of imperfect love. He can imagine in “The Fall” a prelapsarian sexual paradise free of frustration, but he cannot find it. Wishing always to “raise pleasure to the top” (“To a Lady in a Letter”), he writes of impotence (“The Imperfect Enjoyment”),near-impotence (“A Satyr on Charles II”), and voyeurism (“The Disabled Debauchee”). Even successful completion of a sexual act can bring only indifference in its train (“The Platonic Lady”). Several poems suggest a homosexual preference (“Upon His Drinking a Bowl”) or that the persona would prefer alcoholic intoxication to sex (Song “How happy, Chloris, were they free”).
     The slide into disgust with sexuality and the body that has appeared already in “Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay” and “A Ramble in St. James’s Park” is reinforced by numerous other negative archetypes of the feminine such as the superannuated slut with “old blear eyes” in “Timon” and Mrs. Willis (“On Mrs. Willis”) whose “belly is a bag of turds,/ And her cunt a common shore,” yet “ballocks” make men her slaves. Only Swift, whose poetic line was sometimes similar, was equally receptive to the flesh and horrified by it.
     Thus for Rochester wit becomes a fall-back position. If humans find themselves in an intolerable existential void, they are able yet to generate sparks of wit containing sufficient bright genius to maintain balance while illuminating the tragedy of life. The suddenness and surprise of wit exercises to the full humankind’s prodigious cognitive powers (which Rochester finds more often a handicap than an advantage), flinging a sort of desperate joy in the face of circumstance.
     Perhaps the most poignant expression of his undying desire to seize a beautiful moment from the passing parade of vanities is the lyric “Love and Life.” After noting that one possesses neither the past nor the future, and that even the present flows rapidly by, he takes refuge in the sincerest love, committing that moment to his beloved. “Talk not of inconstancy,/ False hearts, and broken vows,” he says, since “all that heaven allows” is “this livelong minute,” but that can itself be “a miracle.” Rochester’s oeuvre is centered on his path through the absurd spectacles her saw all about him, beckoned always onward by that vision of paradise promised by the notoriously transitory bliss of sexual pleasure.



1. Indeed, their hostility reached such a point that Rochester seems to have been guilty of arranging with thugs to waylay and beat Dryden.

2. Lives of the English Poets.

3. In Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, “On Dryden and Pope.”

4. Some dispute the authorship of the play. It was performed in 1986 at Broom Street Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1999 by the Dysfunctional Theatre Company in New York, and 2011 by the Movement Theatre Company for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Portions are performed in the 2004 movie The Libertine.

5. “To My More Than Meritorious Wife” is an exception. The abandoned libertine seems to have been a devoted husband at the same time.

6. Cf. William IX’s poem on nothing in which unreturned love is the decentering energy.

7. The reader will be reminded of Donne’s Song “Goe and catch a falling star.”

Icelandic Antinomies in the Grettis Saga

Parenthetic references are to chapters in the Grettis saga. Bracketed numbers are footnotes.


     Many critics have commented on the singular phenomenon of the Icelandic sagas, an exceedingly rich body of literature from a small and poor land on the margin of civilization. To one translator the Icelanders “were and had been, for a thousand years, the most literary nation on earth.” [1] Though the sagas share some characteristics with Beowulf, for example, and indeed in a broader sense with heroic narratives from many lands, they have as well unique characteristics. Though many modern readers find the sagas of the highest literary value, they are in a sense highly local in their concerns, recording the legendary history of the leading families of the land with many specific details and place names. The Icelanders’ values are, like everyone’s, shaped by the specific conditions of their lives, in particular by tensions and contradictions they must resolve. The fundamental antinomies of the culture generate the form and content of classic Icelandic literature.
     Grettir, the leading figure of the thirteenth century saga named after him, is a hero of decidedly ambiguous character. [2] Like Gilgamesh before him, Grettir is, even within this heroic culture, too wild. His energy, valor, and ego overflow in such excess that he finds himself outlawed and then outlawed again. People respect him and even admire him, but all agree that he is hot-headed and thus presents a danger of useless violence at all times. He is overweening, arrogant, and rude at the best of times, his impulsive unpredictability always a threat. The best man to have at one’s side in a fight, he is an undesirable house guest. Though he subscribes to the values of his people and appeals through legal channels to plead his case, he is constantly on the lam or accepting hospitality from more solid citizens. Through much of the action of the story he is either abroad or isolated in the barren central portion of Iceland. Is Grettir a hero or an anti-hero? In his own nature he straddles the gap between a masculine ideal and a feared villain.
     Though Grettir never marries, female figures do play a significant role in his life. In general in a heroic narrative like the Grettis Saga values are hypermasculinized, leaving women in the shadows and on the margins, vulnerable things requiring male guardianship, hardly mentioned. [3] Yet, in the precisely structured world of this saga, the female gets her due both as a positive and a negative archetype. Eros plays no role in either.
     Grettis’ life is saved by Thorbjorn, “the mistress of Vatnsfjord,” after he had been disgracefully captured by a troop of farmers. (LII) She is described as “a person of great magnificence” and “tremendously wise,” and she makes a judicious decision in this case, later seconded by her husband. On the other hand, it is Thurid, a sorceress, who finally is able to do Grettir in when the strongest of warriors could not. (LXXVIII) He can wound her but he is defenseless against her spells.
     This depiction of the sexes, consistent throughout, is what makes the adventitious conclusion with its echoes of Tristan so discordant. The seductive Sera’s sexual aggressiveness is as out of place as is its counterpart, her turn toward asceticism when she feels her life is nearing a close. Suddenly at the end an anachronistic antinomy appears, palpably foreign to the structures of the rest of the story.
     In earlier times a person’s identity derived from family and ancestry to an extent scarcely imaginable today. The ancient Greeks and Hebrews took pride in tracing their descent from ancient heroes whom they believed to be historical; this interest lies behind passages that may strike the modern reader as tiresome such as the catalogue of the ships in the Iliad and the family trees of Abraham and Noah in the Torah. The Old Norse author can seem to a modern reader compulsive about providing details of ancestry; indeed, the early sagas are sometimes called “family sagas.” Hardly an individual is mentioned without providing data on his family for several generations with perhaps some information on his wife and cousins as well.
     The sagas are, to begin with, far more based in the facts of relatively recent history than the Iliad and Odyssey, and the odd details of wars and kings, while rarely the center of the plot, both enable and lend significance to genealogical detail. Since the country was settled by a small band of Norse exiles and then was largely isolated until recent times (the country is today one of the most popular travel destinations) it was in fact possible to trace one’s lineage to the early settlers. The information in the sagas constituted an earlier form of the cell phone apps that Icelandic youth use to discern how closely they are related to those they might date. [4]
     The interest in everyone’s ancestry since all in a sense are descended from heroes is reflected in a dialectic between the individual and the social. Since Iceland was established essentially to escape the rule of Harald as overlord, a potent individualistic ethos arose in which each landowner had very nearly absolute power over those in his domain. The sagas barely mention thralls and karls except for an occasional villain. Though each landowner was in law autonomous, to avoid wasteful bloodshed and constant conflict, a social order was established to mediate relations among the bondis. The All-Thing was a highly democratic and legalistic institution at a time when much rule was by fiat. (The Grettis saga makes it clear that the democracy was always imperfect. Such meetings were subject to force of numbers and influence at all times and the Thing did eventually approach more closely to the conventional feudal structure.)
     Religion, which in theory might claim absolute judgements, is likewise presented in an ambivalent light. The characters are almost all nominally Christians, but they make no reference to Christ nor do they live according to Christian precepts. Had Grettis been written before the conversion to Christianity, it would have made little difference. Trolls and ghosts do occur, but they are equivalent to extraordinarily daunting human opponents, endowed with power but liable, too, to defeat when challenged by a great fighter. When Thorarine excludes Grettis from Baldi’s expedition, saying he is ill-fated, one might think of the pagan Wyrd [5], but the fact is he might as well have said Grettir is obnoxious and unstable.
     Surely the monstrous afterlife of Glam as a troll is associated with his spurning Christianity (XXXII), yet the Christian priest who assists Grettir putting a ladder into the lair of the giant proves faithless and cowardly, deserving only obloquy in a heroic context. (LXVI) The text neither protests the prevailing religion nor allows it to influence his world-view, while conceding that potency may be seen in both the old and the new way.
     The story includes the accession of Olaf Haraldsson (XXXVII) to the throne, but, rather than mentioning his policy of forced conversion (itself a self-contradictory testament of Christianity), the author praises him, saying “he took into favour all men who were skilled in any way and made them his followers.”
     Analogous bipolar structures underlie the most significant rhetorical strategies of the saga.  
The simple fact that they are prose, though interlarded with many short poems, is unusual. In the Elder Edda, as in most mythic texts, the form of poetry indicates that the action unfolds in a realm far removed from the ordinary. Prose is the conventional medium for folk stories, which may include plenty of magic, but which do not define the fundamental terms of existence as myth does. Not only tales of gods, but those of legendary and semi-historical heroes such as the Mahabharata, the Iliad, and the Cantico de mio Cid are generally related in poetry.
     Poetry is included in Icelandic sagas such as Grettis, but it is set off by a prose background. The verses, in highly artificial language, typically occur when a character wishes to either signal dominance, such as by insulting an antagonist, or to boast after a victory. [7] The author marks such high points of ego expression by marking them linguistically as distinguished from the language of everyday life. The hero is different from others, not divine - indeed, his vulnerable humanity is what makes true heroism possible for both Njal and Achilles. The individual with powers beyond his fellows is glorified by the very language he uses. Thus the structural distinction between prose and verse serves a dramatically expressive role, heightening the heroic personality beyond that of his fellows while the prose narrative maintains the action in the historical past rather than a mythic realm.
     For instance, when Grettir is quarreling with Bjorn (XXII) he improvises verses several times, ultimately brags and then challenges his antagonist with an insulting poem.


Time was when the bear was slain by my hand;
My cloak in tatters was torn.
A rascally knave was the cause of it all
But now he shall make me amends.


     The Grettis Saga is also full of proverbs, making it a repository of normative community wisdom. Frequently such adages have a riddle-like or paradoxical aspect. For instance “Ale is another man.” (XIX) could be the solution to the question, “When is a man not himself?” Similarly, a surmise may be fact: “The guess of the wise is truth.” (XXXI); and solitude may include company: “ Oft in the woods is a listener nigh.” (LIX)
     Like other old Germanic authors, the saga writer makes liberal use of litotes, a rhetorical figure that typically involves the contradiction of an assertion to express its opposite. The simplest form may be illustrated by Grettir’s prediction when he is convinced against his better judgement to swim to fetch fire: “no good will come to me.” (XXXVIII) The use of such expression, common in Old Norse and Old English compositions suggests the laconic resignation so characteristic of the Germanic world-view, with its harsh weather, perils of sailing and warfare, and the metaphysical prospect of Ragnarok.
     Not all examples of litotes involve negations. Potentially lethal fighting is repeatedly described as “playing.” (e.g. Thorbjorn in LXXVI) Understatement may be used to great dramatic advantage such as when Atli Asmundsson, Grettir’s brother, demonstrates heroic nonchalance as he comments while dying “They use broad spear-blades these days.” (XLV)
     By using figures that may be described as “allegorical” in the broadest possible definition (that is, meaning, saying something other than the explicit message), the author implies two radical propositions. Using language in an indirect, suggestive, associative manner highlights the gap between signified and signifier, thus questioning the ordinary acceptance of words as an adequate representation of reality. The reader may ultimately winder whether even the artful words of aesthetic language with its elaborate socially constructed interpretive codes can convey accurate meaning. In the phrasing of the sagas, such considerations run consistently, if just below the surface.
     Tightly organized oppositions provide the plot’s motive energy: valor and arrogance, individual and family, law and anarchy, Christianity and paganism. Its rhetorical dynamism arises from analogous formal polarities: prose and poetry, what is said and what is meant.
     The Grettis saga moves forward, like all narratives, through conflict and tension. In this story the action is generated by the dualities central to the Old Norse culture: the individual and society, male and female, paganism and Christianity, prose and poetry. Neither is wholly privileged and neither wholly denied. Valor carried too far is arrogance. It is a man’s world, but the skills are women must be recognized. Everyone may be Christian but the old ways retain power. Neither prose nor poetry suits every utterance.
     As Saussure recognized, it is in expressions of difference that meaning arises. We think in dualities and dramatic action can arise only in conflict. Grettis represents one proposal, the working out of a series of oppositions resulting in one version of how to be human. If it does not entirely fit, if incongruities leak from every side of the polarities, this apparent weakness is in fact the inevitable result of imitating the experience of life. Sufficient erratic and unpredictable energies exist to propel the individual to the next hour, the reader to the next tale, and culture to formulations ever new.




1. Introduction by George Ainslie Hight, The Saga of Grettir the Strong, vii. This version, a 1914 Everyman volume translated by George Ainslie Hight, is the source of my quotations in this essay. Iceland today is often called the most literate nation on earth. Ben Myers in ”The Icelandic Sagas: Europe's most important book?” in the Guardian (Oct 3, 2008) notes that the average Icelander reads four books a year and that one in ten has written a book.

2. In Icelandic sometimes called Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar. Translations into English have been titled Grettla, Grettir's Saga, and The Saga of Grettir the Strong. William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon published a translation called The Tale of Grettir the Strong.

3. See Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” which brilliantly analyzes Homeric violence.

4. See the AP story for Apr 18, 2013 appearing in numerous newspapers.

5. Wyrd is the Old English goddess of fate. The Norse cognate is Urðr or Urd, personified as one of the Norns.

7. Note the common use in African American writing and culture generally of “signifying,” the artful use of language, often employed for boasting or insulting.

Travel Pictures

Were I not desirous of keeping this essay free of footnotes, I might well have included an overture paying tribute to that grand opening of Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques: “Travel and travelers are two things I loathe.” After a glance or two in the direction of Sontag’s “On Photography” I might have acknowledged such academic studies as John Urry’s The Tourist Gaze or Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class before concluding my review of literature with a quotation from Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines characterizing nomads as people with “a motive for travel that went well beyond the vanity of documentation.” Simply thinking for a moment about the topic, it seems, provides ample evidence for the deep ambivalence that lurks behind travel. Such contradictions seem to underlie most of our important concerns and that, I suppose, is why we have art.


     Pictures have long been the most popular souvenir. Yet I myself have never photographed the places I have visited, though I am as fond as others of recalling past journeys. Perhaps I have wished to avoid looking like a tourist. After all, I learned as a child the classic satiric stereotype of the tourist with a camera hanging over his tropical shirt. Elders will recall the jokes about the ordeal of watching someone else’s vacation slides that were once common. Perhaps they may even have experienced such shows themselves.
     I also recall, though, community programs on the theme of travel. People would actually assemble in in a school auditorium or a library back room to watch either slides or a film, semi-professional at best, of Austria or Greece or Italy with a live narration by the traveler himself. As late as the nineteen fifties travel abroad was sufficiently infrequent that there was a market for this vicarious version though insufficient money was involved to elicit first-rate showmen.
     Now people are shoulder to shoulder in Angkor Wat and crowds gather in remote Icelandic fields hoping for an unseasonal Northern Lights and virtually all of those people are holding cell phone cameras. The traveler now returns with hundreds or thousands rather than a few dozen images. It is now a real question whether anyone ever looks at most travel photos a second or even a first time. Yet virtually everyone feels compelled to take them. Is it merely a more modern and less destructive form of bringing home trophy heads from a safari?
     The prevalent genres of the travel picture seem to me the least rewarding. Surely the most common type is the traveler posed with a slightly silly grin of satisfaction in front of a monument. It is as though the traveler were intent on preserving evidence for some panel of skeptical judges that the visit to Machu Picchu or the Taj Mahal had actually taken place. Virtually the only somewhat satisfactory version of this travel picture genre I have seen is a series by a couple who took their three year old child around the world, posing him in front of each historic castle or church, resulting in a display of enough wit and cute oddity to have at least a momentary interest for someone outside the family. But for most travelers, if a picture of an Olmec head is desired, why should the traveler enter the frame?
     There is some perverse egotism, never satisfied, lurking here. Not long ago the English queen, known for dignity and politesse, vented a complaint. Her loyal subjects, who all her life had pressed to approach her on public occasions, excited faces showing that they were experiencing the thrill of a lifetime, now invariably turn their backs to her in an effort to take cell phone pictures (the name selfie alone should be enough of a warning). She was quite right to call such behavior rude, but does it not also leave the picture-taker with an image less a portrait of Elizabeth Regina than of the photographer’s bad taste?
     A good number of tourists do omit the traveler and capture an image of the attraction itself, be it cathedral, fortress, statue, or grazing camels. Yet professional pictures of virtually all attractions and works of art are so easily available that I cannot conceive why people make so many new and generally inferior ones. In spite of the fact, picture-taking is more common than careful examination in many museums today. Queues actually form to snap the Mona Lisa, though, if the picture-taker later actually wished to study the painting, surely an online image would be preferable, or in a book, anything but the traveler’s own snapshot.
     I am carping, and, of course, everyone is entitled to select amusements to his or her own liking. Further, photography is a worthy art and being in an exotic environment makes taking pictures tempting indeed. In many streets of India a random shot in any direction would be of at least some interest to an American with curiosity.
     So far as I am concerned, pictures of people and street scenes are the traveler’s best bet. Far from privileging wonders of the world, I suspect everyone would agree that dodgy neighborhoods offer more rather than less opportunities for good scenes, though the rule is far from prescriptive. (After all, the crowd at Ascot might be as good as the shanties of Rio.) One can capture something unique, a record of a moment more likely to reflect the nature of the locale than its historic homes or grand fountains, and the possibilities are omnipresent. The traveler on the lookout for a scene worth the capture is encouraged to keep eyes and ears open, mind discerning, and is this not the point of visiting unfamiliar places? Surely one’s mind is broadening more when buying street food or watching a funeral pass by than when the tour bus pulls up to Mt. Rushmore or the bus driver points out the Monumento a la Revolución in Mexico City.
     Photographing people is also a safe bet, as almost all faces are complex and fascinating. Yet issues of respect and civility come into play. Having lived in the Haight-Ashbury at a time when busloads of visitors would sometimes step down and aim their cameras at me and my family, I know that it can seem an assault. Still, with or without permission, a face is virtually always worth a moment’s study.
     Among the travel pictures I have enjoyed, none are, strictly speaking, souvenirs with a primary appeal based on aiding the traveler’s recall of a pleasant vacation.
     I like several photos in our family albums of my wife’s grandparents traveling back and forth to Europe in the twenties and thirties. In one they are dressed in tuxedo and gown, in another in elaborate costumes for the ship’s masquerade ball, in a third, posing with pride next to a mountain of steamer trunks. They provide vivid detail of the sensibility of the time when few people crossed the Atlantic for pleasure, though I think the pictures would be as engaging for a viewer who had no connection at all with the subjects. These pictures have a solid journalistic appeal.
     On the cover of my chapbook Tourist Snapshots is a picture taken by Patricia of Moroccan street vendors. It provides an adequate suggestion, I hope, of the tone of the poems within. Yet, here too, I may get as well have chosen it from stock images. In fact, this picture was selected largely because it seemed so simultaneously exotic and typical. Even for me it carries no more associations than for another, though I was present when it was taken. My affection for North Africa is founded on intangible memory.
     One of my wife’s pictures we like well enough to hang on the dining room wall. Taken In Sarnath, the town on the outskirts of Varanasi where Buddha did his first teaching, it depicts the most modest of tea houses with two outdoor folding tables, a parked motor bike, and a solitary patron gazing into his cup. Above, a large and crudely painted sign identifies this establishment as the Thinkers’ Cafe. The primary appeal of the image is its contrast of the humble place with its ambitious name, a hot and dusty street where it is still possible for anyone with the price of a cup of tea to think thoughts as grand as a philosopher.
     Yet I realize that it does bring me back to thoughts not only of the message Buddha brought the bikkhus, but also to that museum in which we seemed the only ones examining the marvelous millennia old statues, while other visitors, Buddhist pilgrims, went from one to another touching them to collect mana like bees gathering pollen. I thought, too of the tree beneath which the Buddha was said to have preached, with its images of the five bhikkus, painted as brightly as carousel animals, from which we gathered a few leaves to bring home, unbelieving in magic but believing it possible that people could still their souls.
     So that photograph of the Thinkers' Cafe succeeds for me as a souvenir, as a physical object inspiring memory, in a way that a snapshot of my lovely wife standing in front of the stupa would not have done. A stock photo or a picture by a friend could also not have borne those associations. The picture is not art because its meaning is largely private and unavailable to others. The successful travel picture will combine an initial aesthetic appeal with a lingering subjective strain that diminishes sweetly until the picture is viewed once again, its meaning accessible to one alone, or, if that one is fortunate, perhaps for two.

Notes on Recent Reading 37 (Waley, Wharton, London)

Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet (Waley)

     Waley never fails me. Indeed, all English-speaking readers who love Asian literature must be thankful for his labors. Though he acquired his knowledge of Chinese and Japanese languages under Laurence Binyon at the British Museum, cataloguing visual art, he eschewed academic posts and consistently wrote for that virtually extinct creature, the generally educated reader. He never visited China or Japan, but lived in Bloomsbury in London where he associated with literary figures rather than Sinologists. A friend of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, among others, he was as well an early admirer of Ronald Firbank, for whose first collected works he and Osbert Sitwell wrote an introduction. Ezra Pound recommended his work for the Little Review. His literary value has held up; while his translations are not the most scholarly, they are often the best choice especially for non-specialists.
     Yuan Mei was a poet, artist, and food writer -- a translation of his gastronomic classic Suiyuan Shidan is forthcoming this year as Recipes from the Garden of Contentment. He wrote as well a theoretical work on poetry, the Suiyuan shihua. A brilliant student at a young age, he even left a guide to scoring well on the imperial exams on the Confucian classics. He worked in several government posts of which Waley provides sufficient details that we do not wonder why he abandoned the civil service at the age of thirty-two to devote himself to art.
     Why do I feel such kinship with certain Chinese poets? Surely their participation in academic examinations on the classics is a part of what we share. Add to that the implied pathetic fallacy so widespread in traditional Chinese verse and part of today’s poetry in English since Waley’s first translations and the advent of the Imagists. Finally, there is a profound sympathy in world-view. Yuan Mei paid respects to Ch’an Buddhism while maintaining a position of unashamed hedonism, aesthetic and otherwise, as sufficient for everyday conduct. It is what might a few hundred years ago have been called a kind of natural religion. Simple though it be, such a position has been the refuge of more than one fine soul.
     Waley’s book is unfailingly entertaining and readable. It is astonishing what details about the poet’s life survive in documents and how smoothly and novelistically Waley uses them to frame the many lyrics included in this volume.


In Morocco (Wharton)

     Edith Wharton’s 1920 book describing a month touring Morocco, much of it devoted to Fes and Marrakech, is as engaging as one might expect. Wharton had lived in France for most of the previous decade and toured Morocco as a guest of the French Governor-General Lyautey (her fulsome praise for him cloys). As a dignitary she drove about in a French military vehicle and visited the residences of both French and local potentates where she sometimes participated in dinners served by slaves. She saw a good deal that an ordinary tourist would have missed, including the Saadian tombs and harems (the women she finds boring and a bit pathetic).
     Apart from the well-sketched vignettes of Moroccan life of the time, the book would make a case study in the apologetics of imperialism, as Wharton hasn’t a doubt that France arrived at the invitation of the North Africans and in fact saved them from themselves.
     Though this conviction would find fewer partisans today, many of her comments would be echoed by later visitors including myself. Her sense of having stepped far back in time is familiar even to today’s escorted tour customers, and her exposition of the country’s contradictions is illuminating, even when only half-informed. The phantasmagoria of Morocco is, of course, an illusion born of unfamiliarity, but it is no less intoxicating for that reason.


People of the Abyss (London)

     Jack London’s story of his descent into the city of London’s East End, masquerading with rough clothes to impersonate what he had in fact been only a few years before, an itinerant laborer, remains powerful today, over a hundred years later. London sleeps in sordid quarters when not in workhouses, eats in the filthiest coffee houses, and fraternizes with the urban proletariat at a time when many in the greatest empire of modern times were literally starving. Apart from his own observations and the tales told him by many a hard-working tradesman fallen on hard times, London responsibly provides much statistical documentation of the plight of the poor, though this is perhaps less useful to today’s reader. His transcriptions of dialect seem authentic and his righteous indignation is exemplary.
     The concrete particulars are necessary for a contemporary reader to realize how recently the great majority of the working class, not the lumpen or underclass, was in desperate straits in even the most developed capitalist economies. This book takes its place between Engels’ 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England, London’s own The Road about tramping in the USA) and Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. London himself said, “No other book of mine took so much of my young heart and tears as that study of the economic degradation of the poor."
     London’s militance is inscribed in the text but not without a certain ambivalence as well. His distaste for the poor and for their wretched conditions is evident, but an even deeper contradiction, expressed in The Iron Heel as well, is his own Nietzschean preference for the strong and his almost eugenic conviction that the urban poor had in fact declined through devolution into something only just barely human.