Confidence Games

 

     When I was young and television was young as well, my favorite program was Racket Squad, a police show which would always open with Reed Hadley turning his imposing face from his radio where he had been answering a call to identify himself, “Captain Braddock . . . Racket Squad.”  The story would then turn on some elaborate confidence game, generally a long con indeed, foiled eventually by inexorable detective work.  At the end Hadley would solemnly advise the audience, “Remember, a man can shake your hand with one hand and pick your pocket with the other.”  What appealed to me, I think, was the artfulness of that particular variety of crime.  Far from threatening the victim, the grifter eschewed violence and threats and took the opposite tack, convincing the mark of his amiability and trustworthiness before vanishing with the loot.  Like an artist, the fraudster must create a convincing alternative world.

     While the efforts of the scammers on television seemed as though they must be exaggerated -- their efforts to build a convincing façade generally involved actors, props, and such sets as apparently functioning offices -- they were only magnifying, not creating, the theatrical flourish that once animated this distinctive field of criminal endeavor.  Con men of today have no imagination in comparison.  We are all familiar with the extremely common and extremely boring confidence schemes that currently dominate the field.  Everyone receives numerous spam emails and bogus telephone calls so clumsy and transparently fraudulent that it is difficult to conceive of their working at all.  Yet the magic of microcircuits has enabled vast numbers of messages to be sent for virtually no cost while conveniently allowing a high degree of anonymity to the knowledgeable sender.  The immense quantity of come-ons makes up for their shoddy quality in credibility resulting, I suppose, in a satisfactory yield. 

     By comparison, the con-man most people today have encountered in person, the three card monte operator, is a virtuoso artist.  A successful three card monte dealer must equal the skills of a closeup magician in both his skill in patter and in prestidigitation, or sleight-of-hand.  The game, modern successor of the old shell game, has survived in the street, in subway cars, and in public parks because it can still bring in money even though everyone is familiar with how it works.  What observer could possibly think that the practitioner of the art, a professional after all, would ever go home with less money in his pocket than he had had when he left?  The shills are obvious little short of the point of slapstick.  And yet the show is sufficiently compelling that people continue to put their money down. 

     Police reports indicate that a few practitioners continue old short-change routines, usually based on presenting a large bill to pay for a small item and, as the change is counted out, suddenly saying one wishes to use a smaller bill.  Variations exist, mostly depending on using multiple transactions to generate confusion, though a few maneuvers depend on “fixing” a wad of cash to make a one seem to be a twenty or a half-bill look like a whole one.  This practice, too, requires manual dexterity and instant discernment of the clerk’s evolving state of mind.

      Newspaper accounts indicate that the old pigeon drop still can work, too, in which an apparently valuable object is found which, for one reason or another, the possessor is willing to let go very cheaply.  Perhaps he is an illegal alien afraid to cash in his winning lotto ticket, or on his way to an important job interview so he cannot cash in the diamond necklace the two of you have come upon.  At some point the mark is asked to advance money of his own on the promise of a greater return very shortly.  So acting once again is perhaps the leading component of the con.   

     Self-interested deceptions are, of course, as old as the ability to lie, which is to say, as old as language.  Some colorful fragments of past practices are preserved in Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785).  In what he calls “flash lingo,” both “money-droppers” and practitioners of the “fawney rig” are clearly working eighteenth century versions of the pigeon drop.  Grose mentions a variety of other con artists whose specialties have become obsolete.  He defines “amusers” as those who toss snuff into a person’s face, allowing confederates to lift his purse while pretending to assist him.  Among journeyman hatters, he says to “bug” a customer is to substitute a cheaper product for a beaver hat.  He says those selling a lethargic horse might “feague” it, putting ginger into the animal’s “fundament” in order to make it behave in a temporarily lively manner.  A more elaborate charade is suggested by his definition of “Vincent’s law” as “the art of cheating at cards,” a collective enterprise requiring a “banker," a shill or “gripe,” and a Vincent (the mark). 

      This last begins to approximate the professionally theatrical quality confidence games acquired during their “Augustan Age” [1].  Though the set-ups that figured in Racket Squad episodes had seemed impossibly elaborate, in fact, the television version may be no more than a just memorial for the extraordinarily artful criminal enterprises of the first half of the twentieth century.  David Maurer, their finest chronicler [2], describes grand and lengthy deceptions, managed like movie sets, with storefronts staffed by teams of operators, each a specialist in one role of the deception such as the “roper,” who locates likely marks and the “inside man,” who impersonates a broker or manager of gambling den.  Some of their “long cons” stretch over weeks during which they may move from one city to another.  Each participant is known to fellow grifters by a nickname: Kangaroo John, the High Ass Kid, Slobbering Bob, Queer-pusher Nick, the Hash House Kid, Wildfire John, Pretty Sid.   

     According to Maurer’s account, which is unlikely to be superseded, such “long cons,” in which big rewards are possible when the victim is persuaded to draw on his bank accounts and investments, were common in the years following World War I.  Short cons, those in which gains are limited to what the mark is carrying “went out with the horse and buggy,” though he does describe a variety of its forms worth listing for the names alone: the smack (flipping coins), the tat (dice), the tip (cards), the last turn (cards), the huge duke (cards), money box with the coin, the hot seat, the single-hand con.  Over time serious professionals used such tricks only to satisfy an immediate need.  Looking for a larger payoff, they turned to classic long cons.

     According to Maurer, the most common set-up originally was the “mitt store” or “mitt joint,” a term which sometimes referred to a fortune-teller’s parlor, but often meant a crooked gambling establishment to which dupes were steered thinking they might win in a fixed boxing match or other athletic contest.  Under the name of “dollar store,” the establishment might offer as a front a number of cheap items for sale, while the real money was made in short cons inside.  A back room might be given to card or dice players or race track bookies.  Under a variety of names (“the wire,” “the pay-off,” “the rag”) the same basic set-up can be used for any form of gambling and for phony stock purchases.

     Maurer called the con-men he knew the “aristocrats” of criminals and the scholar seems to have shared in their pride in avoiding violence and taking only money that has been freely handed over.   In Maurer’s book they all seem as charming as Damon Runyon characters and his unlikely intimacy with these underworld hustlers is reminiscent of William Powell’s “Thin Man.”  Over many years Maurer studied their argot as well as that of pickpockets, drug users, moonshiners, and others.  His classic account of confidence games describes their activities in convincing detail, including lists of the individuals and locations active in various cities over the years.  He is said to destroyed interviews and correspondence with his informants before his suicide to protect his underworld friends from possible prosecution. 

     The fact that the volume has been translated and several times reprinted suggests that many have savored the author’s light yet mordant tone and his compilation of stories, every one of which concludes in the same way, with the trickster making off with the money and the victim wondering what happened.  Edmund Wilson, for one, was susceptible to the charms of Maurer’s book, sending a copy to Vladimir Nabokov with a note calling it “very curious” and “extremely funny,” but received only a risqué joke in response: Nabokov wrote that “for one instant I had the wild hope that the big Con was French.” [3] 

     Surely in the charades of the con artists there may have lurked some of the poet’s creative ebullience.  I fancy that this accounts for my own interest, at the same time that I was fond of magic and could perform a few dozen tricks, including a bit of legerdemain and a line of distracting patter.  Magicians, con-men, fabulators, artists, all surely have something in common.  Shamans are known to use tricks in their theatrical rituals, sometimes identical to the maneuvers of American faith healers.  Imposters, quacks, charlatans, miracle-makers seem to find a welcome in every setting.  I have spoken to two otherwise reasonable men who proudly displayed tokens given them by the late Sai Baba after he had apparently materialized these objects out of the air.  I understand devotees would receive a momento of gold, silver, or brass corresponding to their level of faith (though it may be that this was most easily measured by the size of their previous contributions). 

     The question is where to draw the line.  If a given guru is suspected of fraud, how about the gloriously begowned Pope?  Is there a difference only in degree between the lies of someone touting a wholly phony investment and the enthusiastic words of a conventional old-time broker?  How may one distinguish an acquaintance who builds a reputation with information fictitious in part from the huckster who creates an identity out of whole cloth?  Politicans?

     Confidence games occupy a fascinating borderline realm, on the one hand artful yet not art.  Fraudsters immediately discover in concrete financial terms how serviceable their imaginative constructions are while, on the other hand, the definition of a con fades into the constant subjective reckonings by which we all must negotiate our lives.  The greed and ego of con artists creates a fantasy which in turn elicits an answering avarice in the victim, the counterpart, perhaps, of love giving rise to love, or a poet's shaping a structure of words capable of stimulating a desired resonance on the heartstrings of the reader.  

 

1.   Luc Sante, “On ‘The Big Con’”, NYRB June 24, 1999 issue.

2.  David Maurer’s The Big Con: The Story of a Confidence Man is worth reading for the author’s knowledge of criminal cant.  Maurer was a linguistics professor who managed to cultivate relationships with large numbers of con-men and hustlers.    

3.  See Barbara Wyllie, “Shape-Shifters, Charlatans, and Frauds: Vladimir Nabokov's Confidence Men,” The Cambridge Quarterly Vol. 45, No. 1 (March 2016).  Con = cunt.

A Question of Tone in The Mill on the Floss

      The Mill on the Floss is a tragic story not alone in the essential sense that the principal characters die at the end.  The shadow of doom plays over Maggie and Tom even in their childhood when the real agonies of their lives lay far in the future.   At one point the narrator explicitly declares that the story is tragic, though admittedly in an unconventional way.  While the genre, she says, has customarily featured “lofty” heroes as the “source of that conspicuous, far-echoing tragedy, which sweeps the stage in regal robes, and makes the dullest chronicler sublime,” yet humbler people may likewise possess hubris (in Eliot’s phrase “pride and obstinacy”) and “have their tragedy too,” though often “of that unwept, hidden sort that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record.” (III, 1)  Written at a time when literary Realism was overtaking Romanticism, The Mill on the Floss sought to adapt the ancient form to modern experience by situating tragedy in a bourgeois setting familiar to many of the book's readers from lived experience. 

     The book closes in a pathetic scene in which Stephen and Philip separately visit Tom and Maggie’s grave.  The postmortem intimacy both between the siblings and between Maggie and her lovers, seems more sentimental than tragic, but the tone is thoroughly melancholy.  Their death in the flood had been repeatedly foreshadowed throughout the book not least in the unlikely legend of St. Ogg and its reprise in Maggie’s dreams while in the boat with Stephen. [1]  Though the fall of Jeremy Tulliver through his obstinate lack of judgement may be the central catastrophe of the plot, the focus is really on Maggie, the spirited girl too clever for her circumstances, too sensitive to avoid self-doubt and too emotional to act in a way others might find prudent.  Then, too, Tom is inherently kind but narrow-minded and stubborn like his father, Stephen is captured in languid insouciance until the crisis, while Philip Wakem, his father, the Dodson aunts, and virtually everyone in the story is portrayed as flawed to various degrees.  Even those who try to conduct their lives with moral sensitivity find their choices clouded by ambiguity and contradiction.  (The sole exception is good old Bob Jakin, whose dialect may sound comic, but who proves not only a loyal friend in spite of class division, but even a good investment advisor.)

     Yet the gravity of the situation in which Maggie and Tom find themselves remains latent for a long stretch.  For most of the volume the reader hears nothing of impending doom, but rather the voice of a warmly wise narrator, superior to the characters in knowledge and judgement, but not as much critical of them as gently amused and indulgent toward their all-too-human shortcomings.  While this sort of authorial attitude is generally foregrounded in predominately comic works, it is present in serious ones as well, occurring not only in Dickens and Trollope, but in George Eliot.  This tone is so dominant that passages might be found throughout her work.  The present analysis examines examples in “Mr and Mrs Glegg at Home” (Book I, Chapter 12).

     This odd condescension which views the characters as acting with incomplete knowledge or erring judgement is facilitated for a portion of the narrative by Tom and Maggie’s being still children, and the attitude is here intensified by the notion that St. Ogg’s at the time of the story was itself naive and young, a kind of immature village.

     Paradoxically, this trait is expressed even in calling the town “venerable,” which here sounds patronizing, as if to say “quaint,” or “curious.”  It is also said to be “familiar with forgotten years,” suggesting both a history and a failure to learn from it.  This phrase introduces a Romantic formulation of the past implying a misty, legendary history including “a Saxon hero-king” (who himself takes a retrospective view, thinking of “the scenes of his youth and love-time”).  The modern more sophisticated reader is urged to be indulgent, to “look with loving pardon on the inconsistencies” of village architecture.  The book’s “refined readers” are likely to feel condescension when regarding the country scene, as the author pays tribute to the readers’ refinement, graciously suggesting that their familiarity with such rural products as cheese and wool is not even in their daily use, but rather only “through the medium of the best classic pastorals.” [2]  The light tone is unmistakable.

     Eliot notes that in earlier years foreign wars had raged and civil conflict as well: “first Puritans thanked God for the blood of the Loyalists, and then Loyalists thanked God for the blood of the Puritans.”  The language suggests that there was no right and wrong cause; rather, each mindlessly reflected the fanaticism of the other.  St. Ogg’s was unconscious of the past, never educated by it, as the village had “inherited a long past without thinking of it.”  “The days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change it” for, after all, “for a long while it had not been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of men.”  Not only had religion as well as politics become routine, in general, “it was a time when ignorance was much more comfortable than at present.”

     As a leading example of such “ignorance,” the narrator notes that it was “a time when ladies in rich silk gowns wore large pockets, in which they carried a mutton-bone to secure them against cramp. Mrs Glegg carried such a bone, which she had inherited from her grandmother” in blind obedience to tradition.  She and her sister Mrs. Pullet are highly predictable, every appearance demonstrating anew the same characteristics: Mrs. Glegg’s lofty view of herself and her family and Mrs. Pullet’s vulnerability to melancholy and pessimism. 

     Mrs. Glegg may, one learns, look out from her front parlor to frown upon the “gadding about” of married women or out the back to reflect on her husband’s “folly” in maintaining elaborate gardens.  The reader, of course, is to feel altogether superior to both, gifted by the omniscient narrator with a vision nearly divine. The comedy widens from the lady herself to her entire sex; it emerges that “the responsibilities of a wife” include keeping a “check on her husband’s pleasures, which are hardly ever of a rational or commendable kind.” 

     Mr. Glegg is hardly more exemplary.  His energy might seem so, as might his delight in close-up studies of the natural history of his garden plot, yet we learn that he uses his observations to seek esoteric correspondences between the behavior of slugs and the like and events in the greater world.  This speculation is excused on the ground that he “had an unusual amount of mental activity, which, when disengaged from the wool business, naturally made itself a pathway in other directions.”  He, too, has a censorious side to his meditations, satisfied by considering the “contrairiness” of women of which his wife, of course, is an excellent example.  Both may appear foolish to others such as the narrator and the reader, but their foibles are invisible to themselves; both consider themselves to have good sense, though neither quite thinks that of the other, and the reader is entitled to look down on them all, albeit with an indulgent eye.

      If he is stingy, he is “a lovable skinflint.” If she sems in a foul mood, surely it is because she is one of those “who seem to enjoy their ill-temper.”  His difficult wife is only exhibiting “a too pungent seasoning that nature had given to [her] virtues.” As he has “an affectionate disposition,” he is inclined to accept her ways and, indeed, to take pride in “the tightness and emphasis” with which she rolled their table-napkins.  Mr. Glegg’s devotion to his garden may owe a good deal to his wish to escape the confines of his house, while his wife caricatures Maggie’s asceticism when she “made her tea weaker than usual this morning and declined butter” due to being annoyed.  The chapter’s final scene between them depicts their muted but habitual friction.  She is set on finding fault whatever he might do and he responds with some asperity, though the temperature never rises far.  The reader knows that the duet is enacted daily. 

     Despite their flaws – the main way in which each is described – neither is in any way wicked.  In fact, the entire book has no wicked characters.  Much of the narration is pitched on the level of social and psychological satire, colored with Dickensian warmth rather than Swiftian fierceness.  Perhaps for this reason the sudden denouement has struck so many critics as a fault.  The emotional engagement mounts to another plane from the practice of humor in which no one really is hurt and everyone strives to do well in a variety of absurd and ineffective ways to a sudden life-and-death crisis and the summation of two lives that had had more of privation and self-denial than of pleasures for years.  The shift from amusement to gravitas is abrupt.

     While combining comedy with tragedy would have seemed a breach of literary decorum in antiquity, by Horatian standards for instance, the mixing had come to be defended well before Eliot’s novel.  Samuel Johnson’s praise of Shakespeare, for instance, not only accepts the poet’s “mixing comick and tragick scenes”; he lauds such mixed compositions as exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination.”  As Johnson eloquently notes, in lived experience very often “the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another.”  [3] 

     At the same time that Eliot’s novel establishes new ground for realistic narrative, her loyalty to the Classical tradition, especially elements of Greek tragedy, remains. [4]  In The Mill on the Floss she insists on the emotional profundity of the experiences of ordinary, small-town citizens while at the same time reflecting their radically limited view.  Each is obliged at act on the basis of, at best, partial information.  It is then no wonder if worthy motives might motivate unworthy actions.  In the end the mingling of what the ancients would have thought incompatible, an impermissible violation of decorum, is justified for the simple reason that it reflects everyone's common experience.  Each of us is given an imperfect view of what is before our eyes, we are all like Oedipus oblivious, walking always directly toward our own undoing unaware of what lies ahead.  Literary decorum cannot govern life; each day presents a succession of moments of fatuous absurdity followed by sensitive concern, a satiric insight may be followed by deep empathy and ridicule may be jumbled with profound anxiety in a mélange reflected in the tonal range of The Mill on the Floss. 

 

 

 1. Among the studies of this device is Larry Rubin, “River Imagery as a Means of Foreshadowing in The Mill on the Floss,” Modern Language Notes, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jan., 1956).

2.  Proust, another writer captivated by memory, expressed great admiration for George Eliot and for The Mill on the Floss in particular.  Among the many studies of her influence on him are Ian McCall, “The Portrayal of Childhood in Proust's Jean Santeuil and Eliot's ‘The Mill on the Floss’", Comparative Literature Studies Vol. 36, No. 2 (1999); Kenichi Kurata, “George Eliot, Marcel Poriust, and the Logic of Desire,” The George Eliot Review 44 (2014), and Inge Crosman Wimmers, “Proust and Eliot: An Intertextual Reading,” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature Vol. 36, No. 1 (January 2012)

3.  “Preface to Shakespeare.”

4.  Fir a general treatment, see P. E. Easterling, “George Eliot and Greek Tragedy,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1991).

The Knot of Dialectic in “Bryd one brere”

 

The Middle English poem and a version in modern English follow the essay.

 

     In a typical example of the chance survival of such poems, around the turn of the fourteenth century the three stanzas of “Bryd one brere” (“Bird on a Briar”) were written on the back of a papal bull.  The words of Innocent III had been promulgated a century earlier and the document archived since then.  What might the writer have been thinking?  The circumstance associates an appropriate quality of immediacy with the lyric.  It may be that a zephyr had reminded a monk in his cell at the Priory of St. James near Exeter of a song he had heard in the marketplace.  Perhaps writing it was meant as an aid to memory or, on the other hand, the writer may have meant to banish it from his meditations by leaving it on the parchment page.  These circumstances nicely spotlight the poem’s polysemy, poised between heaven and earth, suspended in the tensions inherent in the human condition, caught in a tight knot of dialectic.     

     “Bryd one brere” is as well an excellent example, though only one among many, of the fruitful ambiguity cultivated by the poets of the period.  The opening phrase invites multiple readings.  Joined phonetically by alliteration, its terms are semantically opposed.  A bird and its song, especially appearing in lyric poetry, are associated with grace and beauty, while a briar or thorn has a threatening, potentially painful aspect.  The complex affective fluctuations of human experience, ranging from bliss to misery, might be figured as “between the bird and the briar.”  

     Yet the opening word is ambiguous even in isolation.  In fact, nothing that follows requires that it refer to an animal.  As the lyric was originally sung, the bird would certainly suggest the poet.  “Bryd” also can mean a woman or a bride, and, with only a slight phonetic stretch of the sort routine in the era, it might be read as the past participle “buried” or as a reference to St. Brigid. In this way the poem opens by confronting the reader with a series of dualities: pain and pleasure, life and death, earth and heaven.  The image cast by the first three words constitutes a balanced mandala-like concept characterizing the contradictions out of which the phenomenal world is generated.  One knows the joy of a songbird by contrast with the pain of an injury, the pleasures of life are the more acute with the sight of the grave just beyond the horizon ahead.

     The next phrase “kynd is come of love” makes the point explicit with another emphatic alliteration.  It is through the separation and attraction of opposites that nature, the most common meaning of “kynd,” has arisen, both in the biological sense of sexual reproduction and in the grand sense in Genesis of things coming into being through the generation of dualities like light and dark or land and sea.  “Kynd” may also mean something close to what the word means today, “beneficence” or “good will,” implying, as courtly love does, the derivation of moral nobility through love.  In the loose semantic web of these verses, associations with kindling a flame (in some forms “kinde”) and children (“kindle”) are also relevant, as erotic heat and thus children are the consequence of love. 

     Bu the general principle upon which the world moves forward, whether figured as fire, love, reproduction, or birdsong, is deficient in the case of the speaker.  The phrase “love to crave” indicates a state of love-longing, of unsatisfied desire that contrasts with the full-throated bird on the briar.  The bird is blithe (the consonantal music never stops) either because it is so beautiful, which is to say so in tune with its world, a harmony signaled by the fecundity of nature.

     The bird is, in fact, so joyful that it seems supernatural.  Addressing the animal as though it were a god, the persona poses another opposition, in prayer-like supplication asking the bird either to have pity on him or to “dig him his grave.”  The most archaic associations accompany the name of St. Brigid (spelled in a variety of ways, including Brid); indeed, the very existence of Brigid of Kildare is open to question.  What is certain is that a good many of the Christian saint’s characteristics duplicate those of her pagan predecessor.  Her feast-day is on February 1, the day of the pre-Christian Imbolc holiday marking the beginning of spring, so the connotations of both saint and goddess include the fertility of the earth.    

     Without love, there is no life, so the speaker asks directly that his grave be dug if lovelessness is to be his portion.  Though mortality had been hovering in the background in earlier lines, death is evoked here directly in the double mention of digging (evoking successive shovelfuls of earth) and then of the grave itself, all beginning with the growling sound gr-. 

     With the opening words of the second stanza, the poet leaps from the burying ground to the sublime empyrean when the persona recalls a glimpse of his human beloved, now distinguished from her bird-totem. [1]  This visitation enables his own soul to be called “blithe” just as the bird had been.  The appearance of the beloved is little short of a theophany.  She appears numinous, perfect, purely white, so “fair” she is “the flower of all.” [2] The language and the emotion might equally apply to an observer wonderstruck with the beauty of nature, a lover enthralled by a woman’s charms, or a spiritual seeker who has experienced an access to what feels like the divine.

     Yet the delight in merely seeing the beloved is short-lived.  The persona must have her love in return, and his anxiety about achieving this goal leads him to possessive rhetoric.  “Might she only do as I want” the third stanza begins, and prove “steadfast, lovely, and true.”  The speaker might then be “saved” from sorrow as sinners are from Hell, and be instead renewed and clothed in angelic “joy and bliss.”  

     The poem is an extraordinary incantation expressing the deepest human needs for pleasure, sex, love, and the divine, in its first portion a medieval version of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” but ending in an ecstatic vision of possibility, though the speaker’s reward of love remains conditional: she “may” save him.  The last line is subjunctive.  So the poem relates only a potential deliverance from the suffering of desire; the persona remains subject to the ordinary pains of life just as the reader is.  The construction of an image of totally satisfying love only highlights how far short of that ideal his lived experience remains.

     Frustration, however, only exacerbates appetite.  The longing for sexual satisfaction and for truly fulfilling love, the pursuit of a closer relationship with the divine may neither be extinguished nor entirely satisfied.  In the contemplation of the figure of the bird, the most commonplace of sights, seen and heard daily, the poet has expressed the tensions of the human condition.  The poem ends, as life does, in uncertainty.

 

 1.  See the works of Marija Gimbutas for the widespread early European bird-goddesses.

 

2.  A figure of great antiquity, popular in the Middle Ages.  Cf. Anacreon 55.  See the excellent “Excursus” on the topic by Peter Dronke in Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-lyric I, 181-192.

 

 

Bryd one brere, brid, brid one brere,
Kynd is come of love, love to crave
Blythful biryd, on me thu rewe
Or greyth, lef, greith thu me my grave.

Hic am so blithe, so bryhit, brid on brere,
Quan I se that hende in halle:
Yhe is whit of lime, loveli, trewe
Yhe is fayr and flur of alle.
 

Mikte ic hire at wille haven,
Stedefast of love, loveli, trewe,
Of mi sorwe yhe may me saven
Ioye and blisse were were me newe.
 

 

modernization:
 

Bird on a briar, bird, bird on a briar,
We come from love, and love we crave,
Blissful bird, have pity on me,
Or dig, love, dig for me my grave. 

I am so blithe, so bright, bird on briar
When I see that handmaid in the hall:
She is white-limbed, lovely, true,
She is fair, and the flower of all.

Might I have her at my will,
Steadfast of love, lovely, true,
She may save me from my sorrow;
Joy and bliss would wear me new.

The Bohemian Poetry of Ernest Hemingway

 

 All 88 of Hemingway’s poems, including juvenilia, are contained in a modern edition edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis and readily available for borrowing online at https://archive.org/details/88poems0000hemi.

 

     Ernest Hemingway’s poetry is likely to be read primarily by those, diminishing in number these last few decades, who sufficiently favor his fiction to seek even relatively insubstantial new light that might illuminate his novels and stories.  The lyric oeuvre is slender, all right.  His editor has eked out eighty-eight short bits by including high school compositions, while he published maybe twenty-five poems during his life, including others in letters.  Apart from the small quantity of work, even a Hemingway enthusiast would be unlikely to make any great claims for these pieces, many of which seem to have been taken lightly by their own author.  Yet they are revealing in a way that tells less about Hemingway as an individual than about the nature of the modern avant-garde, the values and uses of an artistic bohemia, and the development of the concept of “hip.” 

     Reading these poems with a bit of distance from their composition, one conceives not so much a specific persona behind them, but rather a type, the young and rebellious artist.  While, of course, a good many details have dated, the flavor, the tone has much in common with the readings I have attended my entire life from hearing the Beats at Chicago’s Big Table Readings sixty years ago through my Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series lasting twenty-one years in the Hudson Valley.  Poetry on the page tends to differ from that which is meant to be performed, but, even apart from these generic differences, Hemingway’s poems exemplify the attitudes that have come to be associated not with art as a whole, but with an artistic “underground.”

     Though the literary historian more commonly views the expatriate writers of the ‘twenties as individuals, they contributed as well to a collective scene that celebrated the values associated with artistic bohemias: experimentalism in art and radicalism in politics and morals.  Such milieux, while in part traceable far back in time, have been well-defined since the Romantic Age.  While each artist produced individual works with unique characteristics, many also contributed or assented to the formation of a counter-cultural paradigm. 

     Readings by writers who consider themselves adversaries of the established culture take place not at universities but in cafes, bars, and living room salons.  A goal at such gatherings, apart from the delectation of art, is the creation of a community sub-culture.  For the last two hundred years such milieux have been called bohemias. [1]  Radicalism in these settings not only suggests challenges to social, political, religious, and aesthetic orthodoxies both as proposals and as pure style.  The writers’ posture of revolt appeals to the expected readership all though it may be detached from any possibility of actual adoption. 

     An embattled contrarian protest in fact derives its energy and drama from its not being accepted by the majority.  The desire to “épater les bourgeois” [2] can be a motive in itself, with the potential to inspire both Baudelaire’s in-your-face dandyism, Whitman’s casual open-collared workman’s dress, or  punk safety-pin in the ear.  I recall observing at the first live poetry readings I attended that the greatest audience response was regularly generated by transgressive lines, either sexually explicit, politically revolutionary, or aesthetically outré.  Fifty years later, at one of my own Poetry on the Loose events, an artist displayed his naked rear as part of his performance.  The gesture was meant to offend, a direct descendant of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, though in Jarry’s time the opening word was sufficient to cause the play to be banned.

     An ambience similar to such live venues may be constructed from the content of journals as well.  Hemingway published many of his poems in “little magazines” which cultivated the creation of a community of those critical of the majority culture such as Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review and Der Querschnitt, founded by Alfred Flechtheim and later edited by Hans von Wedderkop.

     The very name of The Little Review highlights its dissent from social norms.  The first issue proclaims the journal’s intention to pursue “that untrammeled liberty which is the life of Art.”  In case any reader should mistake the editor’s intentions, she later included the slogan “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste” beneath the title. [3]  She serialized Joyce’s Ulysses, losing a censorship trial over the excerpts. [4]  The poet whose work appeared in The Little Review most often was the outrageous Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven whose work was often highly sexual as well as seeming to some incoherent.  In its pages frequent contributor Emma Goldman advocated not only anarchism but sexual freedom as well.

     Though European and focused centrally on visual art with oblique and satiric references to politics, Der Querschnitt also insisted on its radical loyalties, publicizing innovative artists such as Klee, Chagall, and Max Ernst whose “Dada est mort, vive dada!” appeared in January of 1921.  The editors included coverage of boxing tournaments as well as of the most significant developments in art.  Its tone is suggested by the claim in its subscription promotion in 1923 that the journal had correspondents in “the great centers of Europe and America and among Negroes and Eskimos.”  It published as poetry Salvation Army songs and the “the war cry of the famous All Blacks', the Maori hakka, of New Zealand’s Rugby team” in the same issue with a song about Jesse James from Harry Archer’s musical revue. [5]

     Hemingway’s poetic contributions to these journals were in many ways discontinuous from his fiction, but most exhibit the characteristics of bohemian art: transgressive material: sexual, political, religious, and aesthetic, suggesting a general bent toward the Dionysiac in preference to the Apollonian in spite of a certain cynicism, and an insider hipness implying a coterie with privileged insight.  While the poem’s editor Nicholas Gerogiannis says that “the poems reveal Hemingway himself rather than a fictional counterpart” [6], their persona is in fact less the author as an individual than a projection of the generic bohemian artist.  The significance of the poetry’s outlaw pose is evident in the title of the earliest collection of his poetry, The Suppressed Poems of Ernest Hemingway. [7]

     The same emphasis is sounded when Hemingway refers to his poems in Querschnitt as “dirty,” writing to John Dos Passos “the ‘Schnitt also publishing a book of my dirty poems . . . Have you got any dirty poems you want me to sign? Jeeze I wish you were here to write a few good prurient poems for me because that is now my only source of income.” [8]  His off-hand attitude distinguishes these poems from the center of his serious literary work.  After this claim that the poems are merely a source of income and asking Dos Passos to contribute, he jocularly implies that his wife Hadley was the author of some of them. 

     In spite of this off-handed attitude, Hemingway thought enough of many of his poems to retain them, revise them, and to publish a good many during his life.  Still, they have found few admirers (though Wallace Stevens was one), particularly in contrast to his enormous popular success and substantial critical reputation toward the end of his life.  Many are occasional and seem very casual, tossed off while doing his more significant work.  Others are written for those in his personal circle, including allusions meaningless to the general public.  A good share are satirical or otherwise humorous, even whimsical.  Perhaps the most pervasive attitude they project is a devil-may-care, insouciant bohemianism, reflecting transgressive attitudes in a cheeky rebellion more willing to sound flippant than grave. 

     The simplest device to indicate transgressive counter-cultural attitudes is the use of vulgar language.  Taboos which have since diminished were through Hemingway’s life strict enough that his use of obscene, scatological, and racist language was still shocking.  Now that politicians and celebrities routinely use formerly tabooed expressions, it is difficult to realize the offense originally caused by words such as “cunts,” (“Sequel”).  He managed to include “shit,” “fuck,” and cocksuckers,” all in a single poem, “The Defense of Luxembourg.”  Whereas other writers pushing the boundaries of censorship were quite serious about their themes – D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and even, I would include, Henry Miller, Hemingway seems to indulge in what looks like juvenile play.  In “The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers” everything is “the shit” and his style is half Gertrude Stein and half restroom graffiti: “Home is where the art is, home is where the fart is,/ let us fart and artless fart in  the home.”  In “The Road to Avallon” he makes, perhaps, a bit more sense.

 

Dogs must shit as well as men
            I like dogs better
           Say: Amen

 

     He likewise engages in ethnic jibes, referring, for instance, to “wops” in “d’Annunzio,”  “nigger” in “The Road to Avallon,” and making thoughtless remarks about Jews in “[The rail ends do not meet . . .].”  Worse, he ridicules Dorothy Parker’s suicide attempts in “To a Tragic Poetess” and Scott Fitzgerald’s chronic depression in “Lines to be Read at the Casting of Scott Fitzgerald’s Balls into the Sea from Eden Roc (Antibes, Alpes Maritime).”  (He spoke of his own depression in “Black-Ass Poem After Talking to Pamela Churchill” with greater gravitas, a somber tone, and old-fashioned prosody.)   

     He repeatedly implies a free attitude toward sexual relations, joking about gonorrhea in “Oklahoma,” and declaring “FOR THE HARLOT HAS A HARDLOT.”  When he announces an intention to aim at monogamy since he is “in love,” he sounds still ecstatic.

 

I’m off’n wild wimmen

An Cognac

An Sinnin’

For I’m in loOOOOOOOve.

 

     The ethnocentrism implied by his use of racial epithets does not extend to conventional patriotism.  In the poems concerning war, a deep cynicism prevails.  In “To Good Guys Dead” he says, “they sucked us in.”  His “Riparto d’Assalto” is almost reminiscent of Wilfred Owen, apart from its more casual structure and image of “a “warm and soft and sleepy whore.”

 

Grey, cold, bitter, sullen ride --

To splintered pines on the Grappa side

At Asalone, where the truck-load died.

 

A similar attitude is evident in “Champs d’Honneur” which notes “Soldiers never do die well” and proceeds then to specifics.

 

Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch

     All the world roars red and black,

Soldiers smother in a ditch;

     Choking through the whole attack. 

 

Never nationalistic, his poems about war insist on drunkenness and death as in “To Chink Whose Trade is Soldiering,” and “[Some day when you are picked up . . .]”. 

     The seriousness of what might seem political poems in part do not survive the general tone.  One poem, “[In a Magazine . . .]”, which describes police brutality, mingles that theme with belligerence toward the “Hun,” though the persona notes that he prefers his adversaries “unarmed.”   A poem dedicated “To Will Davies” (poet and “Super-tramp” William Henry Davies) seems to address an unequal justice system, capital punishment, and racism, but concludes with a distracting throwaway jocular reference to performer Bert Williams.  His observations on America often go no deeper than playful fancy, as when he says “They read the Saturday Evening Post./ And believe in Santa Claus.” and “they wear B. V. D.’s all the year round” in “I Like Americans by a foreigner.”

     Hemingway also defines his counter-cultural pose with irreligious remarks.  In “Chapter Heading” he says he “has danced to devils’ tunes” before “shivering home to pray,” thus serving “one master in the night,/ Another in the day.”  The church is for him an occasion for a joke.  In “[God is away for the summer . . .]” he whimsically comments that the minister’s summer vacation has caused to absence of the divine, and his “Neothomist Poem” includes a line-break pause worthy of a stand-up comedian: “The Lord is my shelter, I shall not/ want him for long.”  He later glossed the bit by saying it described “the temporary embracing of the church by literary gents.” [10]

     While making a show of spurning conventional proprieties in language, religion, patriotism, sexuality, and even, on occasion, human sympathy, he adopted avant-garde rhetoric, closely imitating Gertrude Stein whose work was ridiculed by many, though the criticism only increased her celebrity.  In a comment on his description of the Lausanne Peace Conference published as “They All Made Peace – What is Peace?” in The Little Review, he called Stein’s style “invaluable for analysing anything” yet referred to his own poem as “a joke.” [11]  In spite of this claim to levity, how own mature prose style uses repetitions and simple language doubtless linked to her influence.  In “The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers” he imitates Stein, though sounding careless and flippant while she often seemed measured and quite serious.

 

Home is where the art is,

home is where the fart is,

let us fart and artless fart in the home.

 

Stein’s importance is all the more impressive since Hemingway’s sexism led him to discount other “poetesses” in “The Lady Poets With Footnotes” which dismisses the leading female poets of the day. 

    It may be that Stein’s position as doyenne of the avant-garde attracted Hemingway at least as much as her specific model.  His poems include a number of friendly references to Ezra Pound though his fiction owes nothing whatever to the older poet.  In “The Soul of Spain . . .” published in Querschnitt he claims that “We have done a monument to Ezra,” in “The Age Demanded” he tropes on “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and in “Kipling” and “[I think that I have never trod . . .]” he includes Provençal envois as a gesture toward Pound. 

     As the role of Pound suggests, what Hemingway valued was in part the coterie character of the literary set with its “hip” insider references.  He considered the smallness of the small magazines that published his work as evidence of their integrity, and he defended those in which he appeared against their rivals.  When Pound was trying to convince Robert McAlmon of the Dial to publish Eliot’s “The Wasteland” he also submitted Hemingway’s “Killed Piave – July 8 – 1918,” the rejection of which generated made Hemingway an enemy of the journal.

     The bohemian attitude led him in any event to discount critics in general, particularly what he perceived as establishment critics whom he attacked not with an aesthetic defense, but by impugning their virility.  Thus, Edmund Wilson’s 1930 introduction to In Our Time elicited his observation in “[Little Mr. Wilson . . .]” that in Wilson’s “pedantic” novel I Thought of Daisy “no one liked to screw,” and a general complaint about “All the ball-less critics/ all their cuntless wives.”  Contrasting the vigorous creative type with the effete intellectual, he insists in “Poem” that his life experience has given him something “that cannot be taken from us by an article/ or abolished by a critical agreement of professors.”  

 

We’ll write books.

They will not read them

but their children may

if they have children

 

In “[Little drops of grain alcohol . . .]’’ he wrote, “Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses/ better to see to kiss the critics’ asses.”

     Hemingway’s attitude in these poems is not only anti-academic, it is flippant.  The irreverence and willful immaturity of many of his lines justify the use of the term “smart-alecky.”  Consider, for instance, this excerpt from “[Little drops of grain alcohol . . .]”: “Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses/ better to see to kiss the critics’ asses.”  Or this from “[And everything the author knows . . . ].”

 

And everything the author knows

He shows and shows and shows and shows

his underclothes

are more important than the sum.

 

Or, in “Part Two of The Soul of Spain . . .”, “The wind blows and it does not snows look at the bull with his bloody nose.”  

     His “Valentine” with the line “stick them up your asses, lads” was published in the final number of The Little Review for which Margaret Anderson, in a gambit to overtop avant-gardism itself, had specifically asked for manuscripts which were not literature.  Yet some of his poems are far less bohemian.  Those addressed to his wife Mary, for instance, sound almost sincere: “First Poem to Mary in London,“ “Poem to Mary (Second Poem),” “Poem to Miss Mary, and “Travel Poem.”  Several if the war poems such as Captives” are similarly straightforward as is his lighter bit “To Crazy Christian” about his cat.  Some poems -- “Flat Roofs” and “Bird of Night” -- come to mind) are unironic Imagism.  “On Weddynge Gyftes” is a piece of journalistic entertainment.

     Nonetheless, the bent of his 88 Poems is predominately bohemian.  The poems are significant in establishing an adversarial relation to the received ideas of his day by mocking patriotism, religion, sexual morality, and the traditional standards for art.  He practiced rigorous rewriting for his fiction; he said he had rewritten the ending to Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times [12] and pronounced that “the only writing is rewriting” [13] most often approached his poetry in a casual fashion, because that off-handedness was a central part of his poems’ significance.  He found in bohemia a subculture that would support his artistic ambitions and he established his credibility within it by rebelling against social norms of every sort.  The themes that dominated his major fiction are largely suppressed, though both combat and bullfighting are themes of the poetry.  The primary meaning, though, was to present his bona fides for membership in the artistic bohemia of his age, reinforcing the gap between writers and the general public and fostering an attitude of hipness, implying the superiority of their subcultural view.     

      

 

    

1.  Popularized by Henri Murger's stories Scènes de la vie de bohème (1845), the term is first used in English in chapter 65 of Thackery’s Vanity Fair which appeared in Punch in July 1848. 

 

2.  Often attributed to Baudelaire, the term and very similar expressions were used by a number of writers including in 1854 by Aristippe Felix Bernier de Maligny in Nouveau Manuel Théatral: Théorique et Pratique (p. 85), in 1855 by Privat d’Anglemont (in the form “Je les ai épatés, les bourgeois”) in Paris Anecdote (1855) p. 282), and in 1860 by Alexandre Dumas (père) in Le père la ruine, p. 186.

3.  The line first appears in October of 1917. 

 

4.  Ten years later, Random House invited another prosecution by importing the book.  Though the case had to be pursued to the Supreme Court, it was decided in the most significant censorship litigation for a generation to be publishable, Judge Woolsey drily commenting “nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”

 

5.  Volume V, no. 4.

 

6.  Introduction, 88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, xi.

 

7.  Published in 1929 Paris by The Library of Living Poetry.  It is undoubtedly the implication of naughtiness in the title that caused this collection to be pirated in the fifties and again in the seventies.

 

8.  Letter of 22 April, 1925 in Selected Letters ed. Carlos Baker (p. 158).

 

9.  In Nicholas Gerogiannis’ edition of Hemingway’s complete poems, 88 Poems, those which are untitled are identified by the opening words followed by an ellipsis and enclosed in brackets.

 

10.  Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming, note 50, p. 234.

 

11.  See 88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, 141.  This poem was nonetheless admired by Louis Zukovsky who included it in his “Program: Objectivist 1931” manifesto as a model worthy of imitation. 

 

12.  George Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway” quoted William A. Glasser, “A Farewell to Arms,” The Sewanee Review Vol. 74, No. 2 (Spring, 1966).

 

13. “Art of Fiction No. 21,” the Paris Review, issue 18, 1958.

 

Another Look at Vachel Lindsay

 

     Once upon a time, when I was too old for nursery rhymes and young yet for T. S. Eliot, Vachel Lindsay was one of my favorite poets.  Along with works like Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” Byron’s "The Destruction of Sennacherib," and the works of Edgar Allan Poe (my favorite was “Ulalume”), I relished Lindsay’s strident rhythms.  Alone, I would read aloud “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” or “The Congo” for the sake of sound, hardly noticing themes.  By high school I had abandoned him in favor of the High Modernists of his era, reproducing the evolution of taste that led to the diminution of Lindsay’s reputation in the ‘twenties.  Lindsay’s pounding cadences which had seemed innovative, even avant-garde, seemed suddenly vulgar, and his work was discounted and then ignored.  Renewed interest was nearly always defensive. 

     Attempts to rehabilitate him could sound almost apologetic.  One friendly critic argued for a “redefinition” of Lindsay’s significance taking into account the total body of his work, “even if such a survey decided that no reassessment of Lindsay’s literary merit was justified.” [1]  Another, recognizing that his literary reputation was “dead,” asks  “might he be taken as in any sense now a serious poet?” [2]  Because “Lindsay is not seen much these days,” vanished from anthologies and textbooks, a scholar must remind readers that he “was once considered a giant of ‘The New Poetry,’ one of the handful of major poets in the second or third decades of this century who seemed capable of shaping the American idiom in verse for the modern age.” [3]  Yet another concedes, while making a plea for portions of his work, that he was himself “largely responsible for the decline in his reputation,” since his “critical judgement” was “deficient,” resulting in the fact that “none of his books is free of shoddy.” Not to mention the “slovenly proofreading.”  [4]

    Yet when new his work had been greeted in The Little Review as “perilously near great poetry, broad in sweep, imaginative, full of fire and color,” and Lindsay was proposed to be “the next great American poet.”  To this critic the obstacle to Lindsay’s recognition was not his playing to the masses, but, on the contrary, his advanced technique.  “Like every artist who creates a new form,” she observed, he must “educate his public.” [5] In 1920 future British poet laureate John Masefield called him “the best American poet.” [6]

     The respect the poet received from critics was more than matched by popular acclaim.  Whereas he had tramped across the country in 1906 and 1912, he now sold out large halls before paying audiences.  A literary historian notes that “during the early 1920’s Vachel Lindsay was undoubtedly the most widely known and popular of contemporary American poets.” [7]  He himself was uneasy with aspects of his celebrity.  Having coined the term “the Higher Vaudeville” to describe his more sensationally bombastic pieces, he was then chagrined to find that his audience knew nothing of his other work.  Referring to bookings at intellectual centers such as universities, he noted that he had been “frosted in Boston and hissed at Bryn Mawr” [8] and observed that “most schools do not want me but once.” [9]  He complained that he did not wish to be “the ‘Casey At-The-Bat’ of American poetry.” [10]

     Though Lindsay was well aware of the tensions between popular art and high art, he felt he could lure the less refined masses into enlightenment and progress by convincing them it was all a lark.  He thus cultivated “a sort of rag-time manner that deceives them into thinking they are at the vaudeville.” [11]  Since he considered that he was slipping art to his readers or listeners without their quite knowing that it is good for them, he sometimes called the Higher Vaudeville the Higher Irony. [12]  In this way he differed from proletarian authors like the Wobblies’ T-Bone Slim (Matti Valentin Huhta) or the Communists’ Mike Gold who considered their own aesthetics to be those of the masses.

     Lindsay for his part rejected other innovators of his own time.  He dismissed imagism as an “Aesthetic Aristocracy singing on an island to one another while the people perish.” [13]  For him cubism in painting was a trend that would rapidly be forgotten. [14]   Though he was called “the jazz poet,” he had no taste for jazz which he, as an opponent of alcohol, associated with drink.  He wrote at a time when the split between popular art and high art was becoming ever greater and commodified mass culture was replacing traditional folk culture.  Many artists, the Symbolists and the High Modernists in poetry as well as Dadaists and Surrealists, reacted defensively, producing defiantly unpopular work, sometimes intentionally obscurantist, while Lindsay went out of his way to use demotic idiom..

     Lindsay’s “Gospel of Beauty” was entirely bound up with his concepts of reforming American culture.  A devotee of what he called “the new localism,” his “Gospel of Beauty” was one not only with “the love of the hearth and the Village.” but also with “the love of God.”  Eschewing “art for art’s sake,” for him a “theory of aesthetics” and a “theory of the new Localism” were portions of the same system. [15]  Beneath his artistic practice lay a vision of social justice, and beneath that a vaguely Swedenborgian mysticism of his own invention.  Even his apparently political “Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket” concludes with a wholly spiritual motive.

 

Come, let us vote against our human nature,

Crying to God in all the polling places

To heal our everlasting sinfulness

And make us sages with transfigured faces.

 

In this way he advances in the twentieth century Whitman’s vision of a spiritual democracy by using language to uplift, unite, and enlighten his fellow countrymen.

     His work is problematic in the first place because his search for a popular idiom was driven less by his innate verbal genius as by his ambition to have an effect on society, to advance his program to bring America around to a mystical socialism more exotic than the existing American varieties, among them the Christian socialism of Francis Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance (and brother of Edward Bellamy, whose Looking Backward inspired the Nationalist Clubs); the populist partisanship of Julius Wayland’s Appeal to Reason (published in Girard Kansas), and the perennial socialist campaigning of Presbyterian minister Norman Thomas.  Even these trends, more palatable to some Americans than the I. W. W. with its heavy immigrant membership and willingness to sanction violence, however, were extirpated with the vigorous suppression of all shades of anti-capitalist activity.  Lindsay’s visions had by the mid-twentieth century, long seemed obsolete.

     Whatever assessment one may make of the aesthetic value of Lindsay’s oeuvre, he has an undeniable place in several sub-narratives of American literature.  In both performance poetry and in Tendenzdichtung his place is secure next to Carl Sandburg, another once-celebrated poet now neglected for being accessible even to ill-educated readers.   His unique style of recitation, chanting and singing, stretching and compressing words, is fortunately preserved in recordings made during the last of the eighteen years he toured the country.  [16] 

     Lindsay did write a good deal apart from his declamatory poems.  He composed a number of quieter lyrics in conventional forms meant to be read in calmer fashion.  The contemplative “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” doubtless due to its theme, was highly popular despite being quieter than his poem to “John Brown.”  Lyrics like “On the Garden Wall” and “Shakespeare” which lack Lindsay’s fiery energy, are palpably second-rate.  “The City of Glass” is pretty in the manner of a Maxfield Parrish print.  “Buddha,” while otherwise unremarkable, may engage the reader’s attention through its topic.

     In addition to his poetry, Lindsay produced prose pieces detailing his “Gospel of Beauty” and his wanderings on the open road, a treatment of the art of cinema, short stories, a novel too strange for most readers, visual art and photography, all neglected today. 

     His book on movies The Art of the Moving Picture first came out in 1915.  Its date alone makes it a groundbreaking work, and Lindsay was a serious filmgoer.  Every page of his study is filled with specific examples of stories, sequences, and actors to illustrate his points, in spite of the fact that feature length films were still in their infancy.  His respect for popular entertainment anticipates Gilbert Seldes’ study The Seven Lively Arts which productively treats comic strips, vaudeville, circuses, and other popular entertainments as art.  His larger schemes such as the division of films into those focusing on action, intimacy, or splendor may no longer seem useful, though at least it does foreground the visual character of the medium, but many of his comments are insightful.  His book is replete with clever and provocative observations such as his comparison of Mary Pickford with a figure in Botticelli. [17]

     Lindsay had considered his novel The Golden Book of Springfield likely to prove the chef d’oeuvre of his career.  He said shortly before its release “I am making it the one thought of my life, and hope when it is done, it will be the one book of my life.”  Buoyed by optimism about his visionary project, he said “I feel younger, and may sail to the end of the world, yet!” [18] yet a short time later he noted sadly of The Golden Book “I am afraid it is a failure.” [19]  The book indeed proved to be a popular and critical failure, by some accounts the starting point of the depression that led to his suicide.  It has found few readers since and has been pronounced unreadable by some who approached it.  It is utopian and yet dystopian, socialist yet individualist, realistic and fantastic.  In the rapid changes from 1918 to 2018, from “prognostication” to future incarnations, never knowing when the book itself will come flying through the air, it is little wonder that many find Lindsay’s most ambitious project a dizzying mess.

     Even Lindsay’s more sympathetic critics have regularly qualified their praise until it nearly vanishes.  Even during his heyday, when Time magazine saluted him as “a true poet,” its critic added that, “a great deal of his work will probably last much longer than some of our elaborately sophisticated cognoscenti believe.” [20]  The scholarly consensus since has been cooler yet.  Virtually every mildly positive comment on him sounds defensive, apologetic, hedged about with qualifications.  One if his most acute defenders focuses quite rightly on Lindsay’s his role as a reformer, moralist, and shaper of a new American culture rather noting a specifically artistic legacy.  ““Perhaps we can again value his vision of America, the words, rhythms, and experiences of the many, sung or sounded with imagination and authenticity.”  When read aloud, Lindsay might still afford a a glimpse of “Lindsay’s vision of America . . . a rich, troubling, musical, and fantastic view of our culture. [21]

     This praise follows Lindsay’s own preference for a social rather than aesthetic role.  Anticipating the publication of The Golden Book of Springfield he wrote “I hardly see myself as a poet any more. I see myself as a kind of a forecaster and maker of dreams in Springfield.” The goal of leading his fellow-citizens to a more enlightened way of life had always underlain his work; the Higher Vaudeville gave him a huge audience and with it an income for a time, but he recognized as well as the critics the limits of such work.  Like a good deal of spoken word today, orally performed poems are generally free of contradictions, mysteries, and ambiguities; they are typically simple enough to be digested at first hearing.  The dramatic spectacle of recitation does not survive the occasion, however exciting the live show may have been. 

     In the end another look at Vachel Lindsay may only remind readers of the twenty-first century that more than one lineage may be accommodated in literary history.  The coexistence of a variety of genres can only enrich American literature.  Vachel Lindsay’s bombastic performance pieces are, in their own way, beautiful and significant as are the blues lyrics of Robert Johnson, toasts like “the Signifying Monkey,” the Wobbly songs of Ralph Chaplin, Baxter Black’s cowboy poetry, and raps by Tupac Shakur.  Lindsay’s intention to push toward a new vision of America is fundamentally a spiritual and a social program, best measured against fellow American dreamers from the nineteenth century Owenites and Fourierists, through Bellamy’s Looking Backward, to the Haight-Ashbury communalists of the ‘sixties and beyond.  He is worth remembering if only for having made Johnny Appleseed an American saint.

 

1.  Ann Massa, “The Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay,” Journal of American Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Oct., 1968).

2.  Edwin H. Cady, “Vachel Lindsay Across the Chasm” in Indiana University Bookman 5 (1960).

3.  John Chapman Ward, “Vachel Lindsay Is "Lying Low," College Literature Vol. 12, No. 3 (Fall, 1985), pp. 233-24.  Note the article’s title.

4.  Albert Edmund Trombly, “Listeners and Readers: The Unforgetting of Vachel Lindsay” in the Southwest Review Vol. 47, No. 4 (autumn 1962), pp. 294-302.

5. “Eunice Tietjens’ review of The Congo and Other Poems in The Little Review April 1914 (I,4).

6.  The English and American Muse,” The Bookman, Volume 57 (February 1920).

7.  Trombly’s article (cited in note 5).

8.  Handwritten 1919 marginal note on Lindsay’s copy of “A Letter About My Four Programmes, For Committees In Correspondence.”  Repeated in a July 20, 1919 letter to Sara Teasdale.

9.  April 21, 1919 letter to A. J. Armstrong,

10.  June 16, 1927 letter to Frederic Melcher, quoted in the Vachel Lindsay number of the Indiana University Bookman, no. 5, December 1960, p. 41. 

11.  Letter of Vachel Lindsay to Jessie B. Rittenhouse, quoted in Jessie B. Rittenhouse My House of Life, p. 316. 

12.  See Ann Massa, “The Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay,” Journal of American Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Oct., 1968).

13.  “A Letter About My Four Programmes, For Committees In Correspondence” p. 6.

14.  The Golden Book of Springfield, p. 13.

15.  Letter to Witter Bynner April 6, 1912.

16.   A rich selection of Lindsay’s performances is available at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lindsay.php. 

17.  On p.28

18.  Both phrases are in a May 30, 1919, letter to Sara Teasdale.

19.  December 7, 1920 letter to Sara Teasdale.

20.  In a review of Lindsay’s Collected Poems, July 09, 1923.

21.  John Chapman Ward, “Vachel Lindsay Is "Lying Low," College Literature Vol. 12, No. 3 (Fall, 1985), pp. 233-24. 

Notes on Recent Reading 46 (Kleist, Didion, Soupault)

The Prince of Homburg (Kleist)

     To me the most striking thing about this play is not the prominence of an extreme military code of discipline not irrelevant to the author’s family, for centuries prominent in the Prussian army.  The Prince wins a great victory, but, due to his love-dreaminess, violates orders.  For this he is condemned to die.  In the end the Elector pardons him buts finds him (temporarily) too scrupulous to accept this mercy.  We may be reminded of a samurai story, though for Kleist the whole tension is, I suppose, between heart and mind.  Among the numerous complications even this thread of the plot engenders are the questions of whether the Elector had been sincere (he certainly seemed to be) when threatening the firing squad and what role the unanimous petition from other soldiers may have had.  The most dramatic and radical questions arise with the final words of the play in which the Prince, who had been subjected to a mock execution, asks if he is dreaming and Kottwitz replies “Ein Traum, was sonst," causing the protagonist to fall into unconsciousness again. 

     Perhaps the most emotionally powerful portion of the play is the pathetic passage in which the noble and courageous warrior is reduced by fear of death to abject begging. 

     The play has been justly compared to Shakespeare’s late romances for its hovering between comedy and tragedy and its magical resolution. 

 

 

 

A Book of Common Prayer (Didion)

     In Joan Didion’s reports from Central America in the New York Review of Books, later the basis for her 1983 book Salvador, the revolutionary crisis was unforgettably described.  There can be little doubt that her fierce images and ideological restraint informed the opinion of at least the American intelligentsia.  Before the violence, supported always by a pernicious US influence, became so widespread, she had depicted a fictional banana republic in her 1977 novel, set in a Boca Grande that is strikingly reminiscent of O. Henry’s Anchuria in Cabbages and Kings.   The utter and complete corruption, the domination by wealth and guns, the oligarchy that always governs in spite of democratic and left-wing charades, are historically accurate and unfortunately remain the norm in Central America.  Even when revolutionaries came to power they turned into the tyrants their younger selves had despised. 

     That society, though, is purely the setting, establishing the tone of cynical self-absorption that is normal in Boca Grande, within which the drifting Americans, in particular the distrait Charlotte Douglas, pass their time.  The narrator Grace Strasser-Mendana, who, like everyone else, has no political values, is practically the only realistic dependable observer, her accuracy buttressed by her scientific training.  Yet in the last line she reflects, “I have not been the witness I wanted to be.”

     Marin comes across with very little personality, hardly even a true believer, so dulled she is in defensive insouciance.  She seems purely a reflection of the then-current news of the Symbionese Liberation Army (though the originals were more touching and true and finally tragic).  I would have thought that there might have been room for a few manifestations of idealism or nobility from the Boca Grande guerilleros as well.  Ah well, once again, history has vindicated cynicism.

     For me the best passages were those in which the characters tossed aggressive verbal barbs amongst themselves, getting nowhere at all.  At times they sounded almost like Ronald Firbank characters.  Good fun there.

 

 

 

Lost Profiles (Soupault)

     The subtitle of this slim 1963 volume, “Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism,” is better justified than the title itself.  The old avant-garde has been canonized and what had once been rebellious groupings apart from the prior artistic power structure have now becomes standard art history.  Which is not to say boring.  Here one may find reminiscences of Breton, Crevel, and Reverdy from a central figure in Paris Dada and a co-founder of Surrealism (though he was expelled for refusing to join the Communist Party).  He conveys the ambience of the early twentieth century counterculture, emphasizing rebellion and the role of scandal.  Those who came of age in the sixties might find his account of the scenes of his youth particularly engaging. 

     He records portraits of Apollinaire, Henri Rousseau, and some less likely figures such as Proust and Joyce as well as an appreciative piece on Baudelaire.

     This edition was translated by Alan Bernheimer with a pleasant afterword by Ron Padgett and published by City Lights.