Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Knee-deep in History
I have placed this piece in the travel category rather than in politics because my reflections were written during a recent trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. I did no research except to clarify a detail or two; my observations arose from looking about, talking to people, and my imperfect general knowledge. All writers have one bias or another; anyone claiming to be objective is either dissembling or unaware of his or her own blinders. My point of view is at least explicit.
Just as all people are bound by very specifically human perceptual and psychological apparatus, we cannot step outside of history. The traveler may be beguiled by novel cuisine or a white sand beach; deferential hotel staff and hustling vendors may make the tourist feel at times like a benevolent deity and at others like a ridiculous chump, but one is always knee-deep in history’s stream. Even while gazing entranced at the islands in Vietnam’s Halong Bay, the American visitor, particularly one over sixty, will be thinking of what the Vietnamese call the American War. And even when one is transported with the glory and grandeur of Angkor Wat, the horrors of the Pol Pot regime will rise in the mind like those most fearsome of monsters, reality’s demons.
How long will it be before Americans can hear of Danang, Hue, or Hanoi without thinking of the destruction our mighty country brought to this far smaller one? The history of Vietnamese nationalism is unbroken during millennia of struggles against the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, but in the end, the invaders were from Alabama, New Jersey, and California. The legacy of the American stage of their resistance to foreign domination remains grim. Apart from the death of six percent of their population, and the crippling of many survivors, one tenth of US bombs and mines remain unexploded, now and then maiming victims nearly forty years after the treaty in Paris. Twenty million gallons of Agent Orange defoliated great swathes of land and will continue to cause birth defects for generations to come.
While their battle did finally expel those who had come halfway around the world to bring them suffering, the defenders of the homeland had their own problems. At the war’s end, not only were large numbers of potentially valuable citizens sent to harsh reeducation camps for years only to flee when they had a chance; in addition, the NLF and their Provisional Revolutionary Government were shunted aside by the North, and the economy foundered under the American embargo and heavy-handed Soviet patronage. Though Vietnamese peasants were accustomed to traditional forms of mutual aid, collective farms proved inefficient. Due to local politics, corruption, and greed, the system produced a new privileged class rather than equality, conflict rather than solidarity.
Since the “renovation” of 1986, the old collectives are gone, but corruption of all sorts has flourished. It is perhaps not so bad that people know that they can generally evade a traffic ticket by paying half of what the fine would have been to the officer on the spot, but one also hears that subsidies for the poor are appropriated by the well-to-do. I was told that when the government sent fifty dollars to every family in need with which to celebrate the new year, to buy new clothes and the like, enough was skimmed by successive levels of bureaucracy that, in the end, each family was given only a handful of candy.
The present rulers claim to be pursuing officials who use their position to enrich themselves, but they are unapologetic about their turn toward Chinese-style rampant capitalism while maintaining an iron-fisted political control. Both are betrayals of the history of the struggle. The National Liberation Front was a multi-party coalition including the Democratic Party, the Peoples Revolutionary Party, and the Radical Socialist Party, as well as the Workers Party (that became the Communist Party) and a good many other trade union, youth, and religious groups. Yet today only one party is allowed even on the village level. Fruitful criticism and discussion will remain elusive and cronyism and peculation can only continue under one party rule.
Since the collapse of the USSR, this undemocratic political system has retained only the tawdriest pretense of socialist intention and has welcomed foreign investment, openly inviting neo-colonialism. Indeed, Vietnam is now more ruthlessly capitalist than Europe, lacking a national health system, unemployment insurance, and guaranteed pensions, and putting all faith in cash from abroad rendered more attractive by payoffs to cooperative politicians. Even the beaches always used by fishermen and enjoyed by local swimmers are being purchased and walled off one by one by big hotels and resorts owned by American, Korean, and Chinese interests. If Uncle Ho were not embalmed and put on public display (contrary to his wish to be cremated), he would surely be frowning, if not calling for yet another insurrection.
While it is true that the United States has not yet seriously acknowledged its guilt for waging a vicious and losing war against this valiant nation, the Vietnamese victors have themselves betrayed the ideals for which so many people shed blood for so many years. Much of the Hoa Lo Prison, nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton, was razed to make room for a huge and expensive hotel (though not the Hilton which is a short distance away). A few blocks from either hotel are Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King.
Across the border in Cambodia the people also rebelled against foreign domination and local tyrants. While the Vietnamese endured systematic bombing of civilian populations and the Pentagon itself has confirmed three hundred and twenty incidents of what even the military calls American war crimes, including the well-known massacre at My Lai, the Cambodians experienced the all-but-unique ordeal of auto-genocide in which over a quarter of the population perished. This almost incredible crime was intensified with perverse torture having nothing to do with politics of any sort, suggesting some inexplicable causal residuum even a rationalist is tempted to call the demonic.
As part of French Indochina, the Cambodians were attacked, subdued, and exploited just as Laotians and Vietnamese were, but their histories diverge with the success of the insurgent forces. In spite of the glories of Angkor, in modern times, Cambodia had played little brother to the Vietnamese who had benefited from their closer relation to the high culture of China and the French choice of Hanoi as the seat of their rule. By the nineteen-twenties, far more Vietnamese were educated and a greater number had embraced a socialist and anti-colonial stance. In the early nineteen-seventies, while Lon Nol, who had earlier served as the willing tool of the French, led a client regime and stole from his people, the Khmer Rouge had a membership of only a few thousand in stark contrast to the national unity of the Vietnamese behind the leadership of Ho Chi Minh.
Then the opportunist Prince Sihanouk, ever-ready to affiliate with any faction that would benefit him personally, threw his support to the small soi-disant communist movement, and many peasants, motivated by archaic awe for royalty as well as the crimes of Lon Nol’s government, swelled the ranks of the insurrectionists.
The ensuing battles were fierce. Lon Nol’s troops were merciless to the peasants and often tore out their dead enemies’ livers to eat and acquire their power. As the rebels gained territory, the US began aiding the government by bombing rural areas held by the Khmer Rouge. Nixon justified his role in the country, calling it “the Nixon doctrine in its purest form.” More and more peasants were driven to take up arms against the foreigners raining bombs on their villages and the Americans’ corrupt Cambodian friends. Unlike the long-term and broad-based movement in Vietnam under an all-but-universally admired leader, in Cambodia it took this combination of the vicious Lon Nol clique, Prince Sihanouk’s self-interested support, and American intervention to bring Pol Pot to power.
The world knows the horrors that followed. Apart from the myriad deaths, they include bizarre and utterly nonfunctional humiliation and torture, hardly explicable by purely historic forces. Nor can the period be explained by abnormal psychology as the perpetrators can hardly have been a pack of sadists. Even the frightening revelation of Hannah Arendt that ordinary people may do horrific deeds does not explain the glee, the twisted sexuality, the enthusiasm of lynch mobs and mass murderers.
Just as we use spiritual rhetoric to approximate the heights of human experience, nothing less will do for the depths. One need not believe in the devil to acknowledge the diabolic. Like the Nazi death camps, the Khmer Rouge regime leaves one at first speechless, then obliged to confess some dynamo of wicked aggression deep in the subconscious. The Christian may call it original sin; to the rationalist it corresponds to what the later Freud called the death-drive. Far from unique to Cambodia, it seems to be part of what makes us human.
For nearly the entire period since Pol Pot’s ouster in 1979, the country has been ruled by Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander who defected only when he feared he would himself be purged. This country, while still behind its neighbor Vietnam, has also submitted entirely to corruption and foreign economic domination. All the principled struggles of the past are forgotten in the pursuit of consumerism which in Cambodia includes large-scale prostitution including the exploitation of children.
In many Vietnamese pagodas the altar is flanked by figures representing benevolence and malevolence. It is between such powers, symbolic yet all too real, that we negotiate our passage through life. Making our way in history’s stream, we are limited not by strong currents and sudden violent storms alone, but also by blindfolds of thick gauze that allow only the most uncertain sight. Hand in hand if we are fortunate, step by step in any case, we do our best to move forward, while at any moment we might find ourselves heading backwards or dropping precipitously to the most dreadful depths.
Friendship and Romance in Ming Stories
Of the mysteries interrogated by literature, surely the greatest are love, death, and the divine. [1] The modern reader in particular is likely to understand the first of these as referring primarily to romantic and sexual love. In antiquity, however, and through the Middle Ages, friendship had a position nearly as prominent in constituting significant affective attachment. In Stories from a Ming Collection [2] friendship appears a primary measure of virtue while romantic love plays a far more dubious role. [3] The neo-Confucian model of friendship is not without Western analogues.
The book, a selection from the stories published by Feng Meng-lung [4] in 1620 as Stories Old and New, was written in vernacular language at a time when most literary works used Classical Chinese. During the Sung Dynasty (and even in the Yuan) prompt-books of professional oral story-tellers were collected and appreciated by the educated. By the early Ming scholars such as Feng were composing stories in the vernacular that imitated the traditional style, including addresses to the audience.
Most of the stories’ lovers are married couples, but the husbands’ and wives’ relationships strike the Western reader as singularly dispassionate. For instance, in “Wine and Dumplings” Ma Chou, when he moved in with Madame Wang is said to have “no hesitation in accepting her services, and seemed to regard it all as a matter of course.” (109-110) After declaring positively that he is “merely” her lodger, he is rapidly persuaded that marrying her is a prudent decision. (112) The same lack of passion is evident in the first story of “The Lady Who Was a Beggar” in which Chu Mai-chen’s wife leaves him solely because of his low social status. In the companion piece Mo Chi is approached by others who suggest he be married, and he considers the possibility in the most calculating terms: “I am not very well off . . .” (25) Not long after his marriage he attempts to kill his wife whom he has come to consider an embarrassment. In spite of his murderous attempt against her, when they are rejoined they live together “twice as amicably as before.” (35) Whatever level of affection that would come to, the reader hopes it will be sufficient, at least, to prevent assaults.
“The Pearl-Sewn Shirt” does portray sexual passion, but in a cautionary exemplum. Opening with verses recommending stoic acceptance and opposing sensuality, and a quatrain specifically counseling against adultery, the storyteller points a moral: retribution will come to those who give way to their desires. Chiang Hsing-ko is described as a young man of singular good looks and intelligence. When his father dies, the neighbors suggest his immediate marriage to Fortune to whom he had been betrothed as a child. They suggest quite sensibly that as a couple they could “help each other” (47), and he submits. When they are married, however, they are captured by passion. “From dawn to dusk they devoted themselves to pleasure.” At first this seems wholly positive. They are described as “a happy husband and a devoted wife” who “excelled other married couples ten times over.” (49) When he finally departs on a commercial trip, she behaves with scrupulous modesty for a time. An inadvertent exchange of glances with Ch’en Ta-lang, however, leads, through his bizarre and drawn-out stratagem, [5] to their love-making, followed instantly by their mutual infatuation.
In their first sexual encounter, when she believes him to be her older lady friend with a dildo, her pleasure is described in the most lyrical and extravagant terms. Their meeting is called the coming of rain to parched earth; the are the equal of legendary lovers of the past; Ta-lang “sent the girl’s soul winging from her body.” They are said to feel “a greater joy than the meeting of old friends far from home.” (74) This sentiment echoes the extravagant delight she had felt in the company of her husband. Even though they might have seemed a model of connubial bliss, it is now clear that the couple had taken too much pleasure in each other. Her very physical longing for her mate, the enjoyment they had found in sex, makes her vulnerable to an adulterous dalliance.
Through extraordinary coincidences, Chiang Hsing-ko discovers her infidelity and divorces her, then marries the widow of his wife’s lover, a certain Madame P’ing. He later remarries his first wife and the two wives and he are said to live together “in the greatest happiness,” “all joined in mutual love.” (96) The narrative’s unashamedly sensational and unlikely turnings are to the characters evidence that their lives are governed by fate.
If marriage is for the most part a practical matter and eros to be viewed with suspicion, what then becomes of the tidal flow of human attachment? The sort of friendship in “The Journey of a Corpse,” while very idealistic and philosophical, is at the same time this-worldly. Though little appreciated today, similar ideas about friendship were once current in European culture as well.
The theme of friendship is announced at the outset with a poem contrasting the “contract between hearts” that was friendship in the old days with the selfish egoism of the present. Wu Pao-an is a paragon of this sort of ennobling friendship even with a man he has not met. Seeking advancement, he writes a convincing job application letter to Kuo Chung-hsiang. His prose makes a sufficiently good impression that he is offered a post, but his patron Kuo moves out with the army and is taken prisoner before Wu can arrive. Feeling linked in mutual obligation, Wu Pao-an undertakes to ransom the man to whom he had written, devoting ten years to the labor and neglecting his wife and child. He eventually achieves this goal, and Kuo Chung-hsiang prospers after being set free. When his own wife dies, he sets out to repay Wu and endures arduous ordeals but finds his benefactor is no longer alive. All he can do is provide a funeral and care for Wu’s son “like a brother.” Eventually he retires and passes his position on to Wu’s son, fulfilling his “friend’s” request in the next generation.
The emphasis on friendship is familiar to the reader of Chinese poetry. Countless lyrics lament the pains of parting from a friend or the joy of reunion. The relationships among learned men, even excluding any explicit homoerotic element, must still have had something in common with the passionate friendships of ancient Greece. Indeed, the circle of Socrates’ disciples, united in admiration of the master’s mind, has much in common with Confucius and his crew.
If the quality of an individual may be gauged by his friendships, the “friends” in “The Journey of a Corpse” are an extreme test case. Their loyalty to each other has nothing to do with pleasure or social recreation or mutual benefit. It is based on men of virtue recognizing in each other value that justifies devotion even without personal acquaintance. The friendship recounted in the story is said to have excited such general admiration that Wu and Kuo acquired saintly status. In time a temple was built in Lanchou dedicated to them. (149) The word li, which in more ancient times had signified the proper magic ritual to accomplish sacrifices and the like, the sort of concern one finds in the Vedas, came for the Confucians to mean a new sort of ritual propriety that could be expressed in the transactions of everyday life. A story like “The Journey of a Corpse” concerns sages who are not hermits or monks, but householders in ordinary life, ordinary men who by their behavior rise to nobility.
The Analects opens with an appreciation of friendship and later details how friendship can be advantageous. [6] The network of hierarchical social relations that stabilize society are based on respect and mutual gain, but in the case of Wu and Kuo, loyalty required a display of self-sacrifice and fortitude to maintain a most exalted sort of friendship. Their philosophic dedication to principle would, perhaps, have found a sympathetic observer in Aristotle for whom the highest friendship can only be based in goodness of character. [7]
An amateur in Greek philosophy, I am even more at sea in Chinese thought, so I will not seek to untangle the notions of Plato and Aristotle on the one hand and Confucius and Mencius on the other. [8] The reader of the stories published by Feng can hardly avoid noticing, however, the most unromantic approach to most relations between the sexes and, in one story at least, the heroic model of friendship between worthy men, a friendship so demanding that it constitutes, for both friends a sort of heroic moral athleticism.
1. By this last term I mean to entail no necessary faith. I readily include essentially non-theistic views. Perhaps the term Ultimate Reality is preferable.
2. For a survey finding celebration of romantic love in spite of its obstacles in the society of the time, see Katherine Carlitz' review of translations by Patrick Hanan "Falling in Love: Stories from Ming China," in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, Vol. 29, (Dec., 2007), pp. 169-171.
3. Subtitled The Art of the Chinese Story-teller, translated by Cyril Birch. I use the Grove Press edition. The question of the relation between this text and traditional oral story-telling is disputed. To Birch it is close indeed in spite of the fact that one of his stories derives instead from a wholly literary Tang Dynasty tale. To Patrick Hanan, Feng’s narratives derive not from village performers but from casual social story-telling among the educated. See “The Making of the Pearl-Sewn Short and The Courtesan’s Jewel Box,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 33, 1973. 124-153.
4. Apart from Stories Old and New Feng is the several vernacular novels as well as a variety of other works. He acted sometimes as a compiler of anthologies such as a book of folk songs and as a reteller of earlier stories as well as writing musical dramas and jokes.
5. In the course of this unlikely plot, which takes months (and dozens of pages) Dame Hsüeh becomes Fortune’s intimate to such a degree that the virtuous housewife is willing to, in effect, have sex with the older woman. When she discovers her lover was in fact a man, she seems altogether undisturbed, merely wondering “What am I to do if my husband should find out.” (74)
6. Analects 16, 4.
7. Nicomachean Ethics VIII. This view was widespread. See for instance, Cicero On Friendship or Laelius, 21.
8. Feng, I understand from secondary sources, was identified with Li Zhi whose philosophy was based upon Neo-Confucianism, though a critic of the orthodox Cheng-Zhu School. He is said to have been influenced by Wang Yangming (1472–1529), as well as the Taizhou School. Among the places I might begin reading on this topic are Tim Connolly, “Friendship and Filial Piety: Relational Ethics in Aristotle Early Confucianism,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 39:1, 71-88 and Shi Chang-yu, “Wang Yangming’s neo-Confucian School of Mind and the Growth of the Ancient Chinese Popular Novel,” Frontiers of Literary Study in China, vol. 3, no. 2, (2009), 195-217.
Notes on Recent Reading 19 [Powers, Zhang Ji, Vietnamese folk song]
Sacred Language: The Nature of Supernatural Discourse in Lakota (Powers)
William Powers’ book, though a scholarly anthropological work, engages the poet and the literary theorist as well. The author, who is fluent in Lakota, had, at the time of the book’s publication, spent thirty-six years in field work on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
His primary focus is the special language used for sacred discourse, both among the group’s spiritual leaders and between an individual “medicine man” and supernatural entities. (The term may sound out-dated, but it seems it is a direct translation from Lakota.) Other Lakota maintain that the language of such utterances is wholly unintelligible to them, though this is not literally true. Reaching the spirit realm is certainly an ambitious task for words, but even the secular poet generally strives for some level of discourse set apart, lexically, rhythmically, and formally from other uses of language. He covers as well the extreme case of verses in vocables without any ordinary words, rather like scat singing or Dada sound poetry.
Powers provides a good number of song texts to demonstrate the character of this poetry, though the words seem weak isolated from the performance situation. In addition he comments on the significance of numerological patterns to the community and on a variety of other fascinating topics, among them the complex and dynamic interplay between Christian and indigenous religious thought, the relationship of ritual to song, and the role of the cross-dressers often (misleadingly) called berdaches. His exposition of each of these topics is supported by precise and convincing evidence. He is explicit about his debts to Lévy-Bruhl, often disregarded now, on the one hand and the still-fashionable Lévi-Strauss on the other.
Cloud Gate Song (Zhang Ji, trans. Jonathan Chaves)
Impressed as are many other Westerners with the great Tang Dynasty Buddhist poets, I read with interest Chaves’ versions of this Confucian, the first book-length presentation of the poet in a European language. Much of the poetic sensibility is familiar: the pleasure in retirement, in observation of nature, and in friends. Here the lens is more worldly, less mystical, than in the Buddhist Wang Wei, for instance. Zhang was known for “Music Bureau” poems mimicking folk forms which purport to express popular sentiments. A good number of poems comment on contemporary history, in particular the wars resulting from Tibetan incursions.
Chaves’ book is valuable not merely because it allows a glimpse of a significant Chinese poet. His introductory remarks defend his choice here to preserve the rhyme schemes of the original texts in his translations. He ably discusses the issue in general, noting the overwhelming choice of free verse among European translators of Chinese in spite of the fact that, as he notes, all classic Chinese poetry is rhymed. His thoughtful work should be welcomed by all who love Chinese poetry, even those who lack Chaves’ apparent sympathy for the New Formalists among American poets.
(Zhang Ji, the Tang Dynasty poet from Jiangnan whose work Chaves translated, should not be confused with the poet of the same name from Hubei who lived a few decades earlier.)
Ca Dao Viet Nam (trans. Balaban)
John Balaban did alternative service in Vietnam and later returned to collect the folk songs of the countryside. He provides an adequate introduction to place his texts in context, but the reader is left wanting far more literary and anthropological information as well as notes on the individual songs. As it is, Balaban is a competent poet in English who provides a heterogeneous collection of material of a sort that had not at the time been published even in Vietnam. His simple, easy, direct language seems appropriate for a book whose range encompasses the proverbial saying, the wistful lament, the evocative image, the love-note, and a variety of other sorts of utterance. Readable though he is, I feel I have little sense of the style of the originals or the characteristics of the genre. Creditable as Balaban’s story is, very likely only a specialist scholar could provide such information. Still, one can only thank him for going out into the villages in the midst of war to preserve an art threatened by modern mass media even more than by armed conflict. It seems almost a golden age when every laborer had a favorite poem.
William Powers’ book, though a scholarly anthropological work, engages the poet and the literary theorist as well. The author, who is fluent in Lakota, had, at the time of the book’s publication, spent thirty-six years in field work on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
His primary focus is the special language used for sacred discourse, both among the group’s spiritual leaders and between an individual “medicine man” and supernatural entities. (The term may sound out-dated, but it seems it is a direct translation from Lakota.) Other Lakota maintain that the language of such utterances is wholly unintelligible to them, though this is not literally true. Reaching the spirit realm is certainly an ambitious task for words, but even the secular poet generally strives for some level of discourse set apart, lexically, rhythmically, and formally from other uses of language. He covers as well the extreme case of verses in vocables without any ordinary words, rather like scat singing or Dada sound poetry.
Powers provides a good number of song texts to demonstrate the character of this poetry, though the words seem weak isolated from the performance situation. In addition he comments on the significance of numerological patterns to the community and on a variety of other fascinating topics, among them the complex and dynamic interplay between Christian and indigenous religious thought, the relationship of ritual to song, and the role of the cross-dressers often (misleadingly) called berdaches. His exposition of each of these topics is supported by precise and convincing evidence. He is explicit about his debts to Lévy-Bruhl, often disregarded now, on the one hand and the still-fashionable Lévi-Strauss on the other.
Cloud Gate Song (Zhang Ji, trans. Jonathan Chaves)
Impressed as are many other Westerners with the great Tang Dynasty Buddhist poets, I read with interest Chaves’ versions of this Confucian, the first book-length presentation of the poet in a European language. Much of the poetic sensibility is familiar: the pleasure in retirement, in observation of nature, and in friends. Here the lens is more worldly, less mystical, than in the Buddhist Wang Wei, for instance. Zhang was known for “Music Bureau” poems mimicking folk forms which purport to express popular sentiments. A good number of poems comment on contemporary history, in particular the wars resulting from Tibetan incursions.
Chaves’ book is valuable not merely because it allows a glimpse of a significant Chinese poet. His introductory remarks defend his choice here to preserve the rhyme schemes of the original texts in his translations. He ably discusses the issue in general, noting the overwhelming choice of free verse among European translators of Chinese in spite of the fact that, as he notes, all classic Chinese poetry is rhymed. His thoughtful work should be welcomed by all who love Chinese poetry, even those who lack Chaves’ apparent sympathy for the New Formalists among American poets.
(Zhang Ji, the Tang Dynasty poet from Jiangnan whose work Chaves translated, should not be confused with the poet of the same name from Hubei who lived a few decades earlier.)
Ca Dao Viet Nam (trans. Balaban)
John Balaban did alternative service in Vietnam and later returned to collect the folk songs of the countryside. He provides an adequate introduction to place his texts in context, but the reader is left wanting far more literary and anthropological information as well as notes on the individual songs. As it is, Balaban is a competent poet in English who provides a heterogeneous collection of material of a sort that had not at the time been published even in Vietnam. His simple, easy, direct language seems appropriate for a book whose range encompasses the proverbial saying, the wistful lament, the evocative image, the love-note, and a variety of other sorts of utterance. Readable though he is, I feel I have little sense of the style of the originals or the characteristics of the genre. Creditable as Balaban’s story is, very likely only a specialist scholar could provide such information. Still, one can only thank him for going out into the villages in the midst of war to preserve an art threatened by modern mass media even more than by armed conflict. It seems almost a golden age when every laborer had a favorite poem.
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
The Man with the Golden Arm and a Friend with Six Seeds
Page references to The Man with the Golden Arm are from the 1964 Crest paperback with the Saul Bass arm design on the cover.
1.
In the late sixties I had a filmmaker friend who lived in a broken-down place on N. Paulina in that section of Mayor Daley’s Chicago which was also Nelson Algren’s Chicago. This apartment was decidedly low-rent, with no lock on the building’s side entrance, a pie pan of water on the space heater, and heavy bars over the window that looked out on the alley. Every evening as midnight approached, my friend would head into the forbidding darkness of the neighborhood tavern on the corner and buy himself a six-pack of beer by the promising Christmas-like glow of hypnotic Budweiser lights. He could have paid half the price during the day at a store, but that would have required forethought. Not for him the beaded curtains that were popular among the psychedelic crowd. The filmmaker had painstakingly constructed ceiling to floor chains of thousands of linked beer can pop-tops. The neighborhood is the setting of much of Algren’s work, including the great stories of Neon Wilderness and his best-selling novel, The Man with the Golden Arm. My pleasure in reading Algren’s work is always mingled with thoughts of my friend and his scene.
And I did enjoy visiting there, but I am glad I was not present the morning after my friend bought some pot from the wrong guy and found himself awakened before daylight by the cops who proceeded to tear his place apart, looking for the goods their informer had told them would be there. But they found nothing. They berated my friend, calling him a lazy hippie and scornfully advising him to get a job. He was hip enough at least to know that it would only harm his position to point out to the arresting officers that he would in fact be getting ready for work at that very moment had they not called on him. They tore the stove from the wall and tipped the refrigerator in their irritated zeal, but remained unrewarded until, just before they put Plan B into operation, they came upon a few seeds folded into a paper napkin which had months earlier been placed in the back of a filing cabinet to sprout. The experiment proved a dead end for their own botanical interests, as they were instantly forgotten and had dried by the time the law encountered them, but the half dozen seeds were, in 1969, more than enough for the Chicago Police Department to make a bust.
The jig was up. He asked if he could use the toilet before being taken to the station. The lid of dope he had copped the night before was still in the pocket of the pants he had been wearing since answering the early morning banging on the door. Knowing he was a perfectly harmless citizen, they had never searched him, even for weapons. He flushed his stuff down the drain and emerged from the bathroom to meet a pair of handcuffs.
Once he had been released on bail, he contacted a dope lawyer who knew how to deal with the local authorities. This man, after shrewdly assessing his client’s financial viability, told him just how much was necessary to put in the fix. The accused agreed to pay up and was glad he had done so when he turned up in court and found a plentiful heap of better quality pot than his budget could afford was to be exhibit A against him. He had no way to know whether the cops had borrowed it from their evidence locker or from one of their own personal stashes.
Moments before the proceedings began, his lawyer turned to him. “This morning they told me it’ll take $1500 more to make this deal work. I can’t do anything about it. Sorry.” “But,” said my hapless friend, “I gave you all I have.” “Nah – you can sign over the bond,” his counselor assured him. It was not for nothing that he had gone to law school. The victim signed and was quite properly exonerated. Another case of Chicago justice, settled to most everybody’s satisfaction, even if the man on the bottom might find himself squeezed just a bit uncomfortably. As Algren puts it in the introduction to Chicago: City on the Make: “and the old earth sighs, heigh-o, the wind and the rain, having made this scene before.” [1]
2.
So I was thinking of my friend the filmmaker and his markedly funky corner of a great city when I reread The Man with the Golden Arm, charmed as always by Algren’s vision of the lower depths. Even after living there for years, my friend might have been considered “slumming” [2] as he had arrived from an affluent suburb by way of university. (As a matter of fact, even Algren lived as a child further out in the considerably more respectable Albany Park neighborhood after his family had moved from the South Side.) And the cast of The Man with the Golden Arm is uniformly demimondaine, lumpen or criminal. They are decidedly low-mimetic, always behaving in ways even more selfish and short-sighted than the reader. Algren has been rightly criticized for repeating the lines he likes. Quite apart from his cannibalizing Somebody in Boots for Walk on the Wild Side, he repeats formulae, phrases, and personalities from one text to another. Often the characters are flat, yet they retain their power because that very hopeless sameness is his own individual brand of the stuff of despair that characterizes his vision. In hell everyone keeps going through the same useless motions. There is no escape.
Algren’s stock has suffered since he won the National Book Award for the novel in 1950. Leslie Fiedler attacked him as the Last of the Proletarian Writers retailing vulgar leftist conventions long after their vogue had ended. [3] In fact, a disciple of Zhdanov would, of course, have shrunk from portraying such degraded types as petty con men, shoplifters, and junkies at all. In Algren’s book, there is never the slightest doubt that everything is rigged for the benefit of those on top, but there is also no glimmer of a way out from under for characters who offer little indeed that seems remotely redemptive. The human dilemma of absurd and helpless actors in a circular script suggests far more of Existentialism than of Marxism.
There is certainly an economic critique in his sweeping accusation “All had gone stale for these disinherited.” He locates their deficiency precisely in “the great, secret, and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the land where ownership and virtue are one.” (22) Still, the fault seems more human than class-based when Frankie Machine laments that “all you businessmen [are] cheatin’ the people so fast ‘n hard there’s nothin’ left for an honest hustler to steal.” (114) In his private musings Bednar the police captain considers himself as guilty as the criminals and strives not to feel sympathy for them. (314-5) The greed and self-deception of the down-and-out illustrate not deviance and pathology but common humanity. In the end, as Frankie muses “Everybody’s a habitual in his heart. I’m no worse’n anyone else.” (293) This commonality, however, is based on a blind self-interest in a world where “Ain’t nobody on anyone’s side no more. You’re the oney one on your side, and I’m the oney one on mine.” So bleak is the prospect that “under one moon or another, he knew not one man on the side of men.” (305) A “half-crazed” priest in a police lineup declares a contrary line, “we are all members of one another,” but no one can even make any sense of his words. (314) In a temporary fit of anxiety or insight Antek may say “I’m not cryin’ for my own trouble. . . I’m cryin’ for everybody’s,” but Frankie knows the mood will pass. “He’ll be back behind his bar Monday morning.” (171) Moral responsibility can never be fruitfully traced in this tragic world. How can an individual be guilty when “we all got caught in it, one way or another”? (342) There can be no distinctions when “everyone’s chickens would be coming home to roost soon enough.” (114)
To Algren we are all in the same spot as the “single gander” who stood gawking between its legs at a cord that forever held it fast” in front of Piechota’s Poultry (246), clueless and waiting for slaughter. Algren is eloquent with his animal images, but always with the same implication. Among others one might count Rumdum the drunken dog, the deaf-and-dumb cat (248), the cockroach overturned in the water bucket, (26) and the caged monkeys who can only cast baleful glances from the imprisonment above the bar and yearn for their lost Congo (321). [4] But even their lost eyes cannot compare with the fierce intimacy of the monkey on Frankie’s back.
Human life is reflected in the “lonely beat” of “the last fly of autumn” who is trapped “in hustlers’ territory with one conviction to go.” (105) By the end of the novel such insects reappear in Sophie’s madhouse vision. “The wind is blowing the flies away. God had forgotten us all.” (354) Ego washes away: “They don’t remember people around here any more.” (25)
The world is a “neon carnival” (104) in which dope or drink or the illusion of love can sustain one for a time. In desperation people strive to avoid feeling through intoxication; the New Years Eve party at Antek’s is wild and diverting (170 ff.), but only for a time could the denizens of Division Street avoid the sobering conviction that 1947 would be “a long, long year.” (175) The world is a game of cards and the best option is to get into the game and play a hand with spirit because there is no opting out, and no one winds in the end except the house. “The cards kept the everlasting darkness off, the cards lent everlasting hope. The cards meant any man in the world might win back his long-lost life, gone somewhere far away.” (130)
Every incident of human life might be entered into Sophie’s Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence. (39, 254) We are indeed in a vale of tears, and Algren invokes religious imagery repeatedly, ironic usages finally coalescing with straightforward ones. In prison Frankie attends mass regularly and identifies with Christ’s suffering showing particular devotion to the Station of the Cross depicting Christ’s falling. (224) Later on the street he sees the wind stirring a lost kite and notes that “the frail cross of the kite’s frame hung as piteously as his own heart had hung.” (263) Heroin is “God’s medicine,” (30, 90) and the police interrogation room is “the only house of true worship.” (290)
So I would say Algren’s concerns are philosophical or spiritual rather than social or psychological. His low-life characters simply find themselves in an environment where it is hard to avoid looking reality in the face. Lacking the comforts of bourgeois life, they must work harder to maintain any illusion at all. Frankie may imagine himself the next Gene Krupa and Sophie picture herself singing with an all-girl band (255), but these are last pathetic wisps of straw at which they clutch as they daily confront their own ignominy, powerlessness, and mortality. The reader is drawn to their portraits by the uncompromising power of that bleak vision. Perhaps my friend on N. Paulina and I were seeking the scent of a world where simply to survive is heroic. Even if we occupied just such a world already ineluctably, we may have needed a whiff or two of stench to make the point.
When I attended the University of Iowa in 1971 where Algren had taught in the middle sixties, I heard that he was more attentive to poker games than to the Writers Workshop, but that, for all his enthusiasm and presumed street smarts, he invariably lost. Perhaps he had to teach himself the same old lesson he never tired of teaching the rest of us losers: we’re all in the same boat and the water in the hold is only getting deeper. Though it is patently untrue that “just junkies know how everything is,” (278) [5] they may in fact hold fewer illusions. And the same may be true for their chroniclers.
1. p. 10.
2. Use of the word slumming to describe visiting poor neighborhoods as a recreation dates from 1884 according to the OED. The phenomenon deserves attention as one of the distinctly modern forms of ironic aesthetic appreciation along with kitsch and camp.
3. Leslie Fiedler, “The Noble Savages of Skid Row,” The Reporter. July 12, 1956. Fiedler also called Algren the “bard of the stumblebums.” Around the same time, Algren was also publicly attacked by a young Norman Podhoretz in a June 2, 1956 article for the The New Yorker entitled “The Man with the Golden Beef.” Both critics were responding to the publication of Walk on the Wild Side.
4. On the same page is a reference to the “Negro streets.” Is this the source of Ginsberg’s line in the opening of Howl?
5. In fact, according to his Paris Review interview, Frankie Machine had not originally been a junkie. Algren’s agent admired the book but said it needed a “peg.” Algren claims in the same interview that the lives of ordinary people without “big scenes” would make “an awfully good book.” However, he notes that these typical citizens might hustle a bit on the street and use just a bit of heroin “to keep from getting sick.” They don’t sound so different from the cast he used.
1.
In the late sixties I had a filmmaker friend who lived in a broken-down place on N. Paulina in that section of Mayor Daley’s Chicago which was also Nelson Algren’s Chicago. This apartment was decidedly low-rent, with no lock on the building’s side entrance, a pie pan of water on the space heater, and heavy bars over the window that looked out on the alley. Every evening as midnight approached, my friend would head into the forbidding darkness of the neighborhood tavern on the corner and buy himself a six-pack of beer by the promising Christmas-like glow of hypnotic Budweiser lights. He could have paid half the price during the day at a store, but that would have required forethought. Not for him the beaded curtains that were popular among the psychedelic crowd. The filmmaker had painstakingly constructed ceiling to floor chains of thousands of linked beer can pop-tops. The neighborhood is the setting of much of Algren’s work, including the great stories of Neon Wilderness and his best-selling novel, The Man with the Golden Arm. My pleasure in reading Algren’s work is always mingled with thoughts of my friend and his scene.
And I did enjoy visiting there, but I am glad I was not present the morning after my friend bought some pot from the wrong guy and found himself awakened before daylight by the cops who proceeded to tear his place apart, looking for the goods their informer had told them would be there. But they found nothing. They berated my friend, calling him a lazy hippie and scornfully advising him to get a job. He was hip enough at least to know that it would only harm his position to point out to the arresting officers that he would in fact be getting ready for work at that very moment had they not called on him. They tore the stove from the wall and tipped the refrigerator in their irritated zeal, but remained unrewarded until, just before they put Plan B into operation, they came upon a few seeds folded into a paper napkin which had months earlier been placed in the back of a filing cabinet to sprout. The experiment proved a dead end for their own botanical interests, as they were instantly forgotten and had dried by the time the law encountered them, but the half dozen seeds were, in 1969, more than enough for the Chicago Police Department to make a bust.
The jig was up. He asked if he could use the toilet before being taken to the station. The lid of dope he had copped the night before was still in the pocket of the pants he had been wearing since answering the early morning banging on the door. Knowing he was a perfectly harmless citizen, they had never searched him, even for weapons. He flushed his stuff down the drain and emerged from the bathroom to meet a pair of handcuffs.
Once he had been released on bail, he contacted a dope lawyer who knew how to deal with the local authorities. This man, after shrewdly assessing his client’s financial viability, told him just how much was necessary to put in the fix. The accused agreed to pay up and was glad he had done so when he turned up in court and found a plentiful heap of better quality pot than his budget could afford was to be exhibit A against him. He had no way to know whether the cops had borrowed it from their evidence locker or from one of their own personal stashes.
Moments before the proceedings began, his lawyer turned to him. “This morning they told me it’ll take $1500 more to make this deal work. I can’t do anything about it. Sorry.” “But,” said my hapless friend, “I gave you all I have.” “Nah – you can sign over the bond,” his counselor assured him. It was not for nothing that he had gone to law school. The victim signed and was quite properly exonerated. Another case of Chicago justice, settled to most everybody’s satisfaction, even if the man on the bottom might find himself squeezed just a bit uncomfortably. As Algren puts it in the introduction to Chicago: City on the Make: “and the old earth sighs, heigh-o, the wind and the rain, having made this scene before.” [1]
2.
So I was thinking of my friend the filmmaker and his markedly funky corner of a great city when I reread The Man with the Golden Arm, charmed as always by Algren’s vision of the lower depths. Even after living there for years, my friend might have been considered “slumming” [2] as he had arrived from an affluent suburb by way of university. (As a matter of fact, even Algren lived as a child further out in the considerably more respectable Albany Park neighborhood after his family had moved from the South Side.) And the cast of The Man with the Golden Arm is uniformly demimondaine, lumpen or criminal. They are decidedly low-mimetic, always behaving in ways even more selfish and short-sighted than the reader. Algren has been rightly criticized for repeating the lines he likes. Quite apart from his cannibalizing Somebody in Boots for Walk on the Wild Side, he repeats formulae, phrases, and personalities from one text to another. Often the characters are flat, yet they retain their power because that very hopeless sameness is his own individual brand of the stuff of despair that characterizes his vision. In hell everyone keeps going through the same useless motions. There is no escape.
Algren’s stock has suffered since he won the National Book Award for the novel in 1950. Leslie Fiedler attacked him as the Last of the Proletarian Writers retailing vulgar leftist conventions long after their vogue had ended. [3] In fact, a disciple of Zhdanov would, of course, have shrunk from portraying such degraded types as petty con men, shoplifters, and junkies at all. In Algren’s book, there is never the slightest doubt that everything is rigged for the benefit of those on top, but there is also no glimmer of a way out from under for characters who offer little indeed that seems remotely redemptive. The human dilemma of absurd and helpless actors in a circular script suggests far more of Existentialism than of Marxism.
There is certainly an economic critique in his sweeping accusation “All had gone stale for these disinherited.” He locates their deficiency precisely in “the great, secret, and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the land where ownership and virtue are one.” (22) Still, the fault seems more human than class-based when Frankie Machine laments that “all you businessmen [are] cheatin’ the people so fast ‘n hard there’s nothin’ left for an honest hustler to steal.” (114) In his private musings Bednar the police captain considers himself as guilty as the criminals and strives not to feel sympathy for them. (314-5) The greed and self-deception of the down-and-out illustrate not deviance and pathology but common humanity. In the end, as Frankie muses “Everybody’s a habitual in his heart. I’m no worse’n anyone else.” (293) This commonality, however, is based on a blind self-interest in a world where “Ain’t nobody on anyone’s side no more. You’re the oney one on your side, and I’m the oney one on mine.” So bleak is the prospect that “under one moon or another, he knew not one man on the side of men.” (305) A “half-crazed” priest in a police lineup declares a contrary line, “we are all members of one another,” but no one can even make any sense of his words. (314) In a temporary fit of anxiety or insight Antek may say “I’m not cryin’ for my own trouble. . . I’m cryin’ for everybody’s,” but Frankie knows the mood will pass. “He’ll be back behind his bar Monday morning.” (171) Moral responsibility can never be fruitfully traced in this tragic world. How can an individual be guilty when “we all got caught in it, one way or another”? (342) There can be no distinctions when “everyone’s chickens would be coming home to roost soon enough.” (114)
To Algren we are all in the same spot as the “single gander” who stood gawking between its legs at a cord that forever held it fast” in front of Piechota’s Poultry (246), clueless and waiting for slaughter. Algren is eloquent with his animal images, but always with the same implication. Among others one might count Rumdum the drunken dog, the deaf-and-dumb cat (248), the cockroach overturned in the water bucket, (26) and the caged monkeys who can only cast baleful glances from the imprisonment above the bar and yearn for their lost Congo (321). [4] But even their lost eyes cannot compare with the fierce intimacy of the monkey on Frankie’s back.
Human life is reflected in the “lonely beat” of “the last fly of autumn” who is trapped “in hustlers’ territory with one conviction to go.” (105) By the end of the novel such insects reappear in Sophie’s madhouse vision. “The wind is blowing the flies away. God had forgotten us all.” (354) Ego washes away: “They don’t remember people around here any more.” (25)
The world is a “neon carnival” (104) in which dope or drink or the illusion of love can sustain one for a time. In desperation people strive to avoid feeling through intoxication; the New Years Eve party at Antek’s is wild and diverting (170 ff.), but only for a time could the denizens of Division Street avoid the sobering conviction that 1947 would be “a long, long year.” (175) The world is a game of cards and the best option is to get into the game and play a hand with spirit because there is no opting out, and no one winds in the end except the house. “The cards kept the everlasting darkness off, the cards lent everlasting hope. The cards meant any man in the world might win back his long-lost life, gone somewhere far away.” (130)
Every incident of human life might be entered into Sophie’s Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence. (39, 254) We are indeed in a vale of tears, and Algren invokes religious imagery repeatedly, ironic usages finally coalescing with straightforward ones. In prison Frankie attends mass regularly and identifies with Christ’s suffering showing particular devotion to the Station of the Cross depicting Christ’s falling. (224) Later on the street he sees the wind stirring a lost kite and notes that “the frail cross of the kite’s frame hung as piteously as his own heart had hung.” (263) Heroin is “God’s medicine,” (30, 90) and the police interrogation room is “the only house of true worship.” (290)
So I would say Algren’s concerns are philosophical or spiritual rather than social or psychological. His low-life characters simply find themselves in an environment where it is hard to avoid looking reality in the face. Lacking the comforts of bourgeois life, they must work harder to maintain any illusion at all. Frankie may imagine himself the next Gene Krupa and Sophie picture herself singing with an all-girl band (255), but these are last pathetic wisps of straw at which they clutch as they daily confront their own ignominy, powerlessness, and mortality. The reader is drawn to their portraits by the uncompromising power of that bleak vision. Perhaps my friend on N. Paulina and I were seeking the scent of a world where simply to survive is heroic. Even if we occupied just such a world already ineluctably, we may have needed a whiff or two of stench to make the point.
When I attended the University of Iowa in 1971 where Algren had taught in the middle sixties, I heard that he was more attentive to poker games than to the Writers Workshop, but that, for all his enthusiasm and presumed street smarts, he invariably lost. Perhaps he had to teach himself the same old lesson he never tired of teaching the rest of us losers: we’re all in the same boat and the water in the hold is only getting deeper. Though it is patently untrue that “just junkies know how everything is,” (278) [5] they may in fact hold fewer illusions. And the same may be true for their chroniclers.
1. p. 10.
2. Use of the word slumming to describe visiting poor neighborhoods as a recreation dates from 1884 according to the OED. The phenomenon deserves attention as one of the distinctly modern forms of ironic aesthetic appreciation along with kitsch and camp.
3. Leslie Fiedler, “The Noble Savages of Skid Row,” The Reporter. July 12, 1956. Fiedler also called Algren the “bard of the stumblebums.” Around the same time, Algren was also publicly attacked by a young Norman Podhoretz in a June 2, 1956 article for the The New Yorker entitled “The Man with the Golden Beef.” Both critics were responding to the publication of Walk on the Wild Side.
4. On the same page is a reference to the “Negro streets.” Is this the source of Ginsberg’s line in the opening of Howl?
5. In fact, according to his Paris Review interview, Frankie Machine had not originally been a junkie. Algren’s agent admired the book but said it needed a “peg.” Algren claims in the same interview that the lives of ordinary people without “big scenes” would make “an awfully good book.” However, he notes that these typical citizens might hustle a bit on the street and use just a bit of heroin “to keep from getting sick.” They don’t sound so different from the cast he used.
Hitchhiking in France
I don’t know if there was ever a golden age of hitchhiking, but I do know that it was challenging in Europe even forty years ago. When Patricia and I arrived in Luxembourg in the fall of 1970 on Icelandic Airlines, often in those days the cheapest transatlantic flight, we barely caught our breath, so eager were we to plunge into the uncertainties of the road. Ignoring the considerable charm of the small country where we had landed, the very morning after our arrival we stationed ourselves on what we, though mapless, figured might be a road that would eventually lead toward Paris, put out our thumbs, and waited for our adventure to begin. The adventure was not, however, at all swift to meet us. After several hours had passed, Patricia contrived to cut my hair with the surpassingly dull scissors attachment on our old multi-tool knife. We waited. The sun climbed. In spite of her craftsmanship, the poor tool with which she had worked may well have made my appearance more alarming yet. At any rate, we found ourselves waiting still. The sun had passed its meridian by the time some Algerians picked us up and, when they heard how long we had been by the side of the road, commented, “People are afraid of Charlie Manson.” (His trial had been sensational news a few months earlier.) This initial ride was our first taste of the great-hearted North African hospitality we were to enjoy so much in the months to come. The next morning I shaved. We kept moving, albeit in fits and starts.
Some days later we selected a spot near the Cité Universitaire in Paris, heading, we hoped, toward the land of the troubadours and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. As in Morocco, Amsterdam, and Ibiza, we felt as though we were working through the itinerary of the hip version of a Cook’s Tour. Every utility pole in the area was covered by the comments of travelers like ourselves, not infrequently lamenting the lack of a ride. One said “What kind of a shithole is this?” though another counseled “When you feel down think where you are and where others are. Love and peace, Jane, Miranda, and Sher September 1970.” Many of our predecessors had, it seems, enjoyed ample leisure to linger in Paris and philosophize a bit before departing, and yet they had all eventually moved on, and we did as well, pausing in Lyons for a few days before heading further south.
Hitchhiking puts more than the traveler’s schedule at risk. Part of its charm is marginality. In America and elsewhere, while it may be tolerated, it invariably attracts suspicion. From our post on the on-ramp of the autoroute, we saw the cops coming. Though we dropped our thumbs out of respect, the gesture was useless. We were apprehended, questioned, and driven to the local station where the officers diverted themselves, going through our backpacks thoroughly, inspecting each item and then passing it around their circle. They took the most curious interest in our belongings. The excuse may have been to search for cannabis or weapons or poached truffles, but they seemed to be simply passing the time of day on a slow afternoon. I am afraid their rewards were few. One was delighted to come upon some condoms which he held in the air, brightening the entire mood and attracting a flurry of witty comments. Finding a recorder, a gendarme asked Patricia to play, and she managed to pipe out a creditable version of the Marseillaise. We now had the officers on our side, but not until all were thoroughly bored did they issue a ticket, assess a fine, and kindly drive us back to the on-ramp to continue awaiting a ride.
It was by then deep into the afternoon and we were pleased when, after a relatively short interval, a dark and gleaming luxury car, as though just arriving out of a dream, pulled to the side and the inviting door opened. We were not only on our way; we were in a factory-fresh Mercedes, just purchased by our driver, a small middle-aged Greek business owner with the pencil moustache of a leading man of the twenties or a villain of the thirties. To break in the new engine, he had decided to drive from his home in Germany to Spain and back. He was accompanied by an employee, the pleasant and strapping young fellow who had waved us in. The worker’s family lived in Barcelona, and the pair meant to stop there before turning around and heading back.
We appreciated the car’s fine suspension system as we cruised through southern France. The entire side of an outbuilding set among vines was painted with the visage of Louis Pasteur along with his enthusiastic recommendation of wine as not only the “healthiest” but also the most “health-giving” of drinks. Our sightseeing was punctuated by increasing outbursts of imperial irritability from our driver who exercised the last full measure of capitalist privilege, while the younger man was quietly compliant and submissive, patient as well, as the day wore on.
Among our host’s displays of ill-temper, he fulminated now and then against the hippies. In the fall of 1970 none were more aware than we that the crest in the masses now considering themselves in some way counter-cultural had coincided with a strength in the dollar, modest airfares, and a re-imagining of the old post-university Grand Tour, resulting in what must have struck Europeans as unseemly crowds of shabby semi-indigent young American tourists with backpacks. (Later, when we took a ferry to Ibiza, our cheap seats were in a large lounge where a Franco government channel played for hours on the television, warning the righteous Catholic Spaniards about the corruption that dissolute young addicts were bringing to their country. Patricia and I stood to the side while the other passengers, a working class bunch returning home for the Christmas holidays after working on the mainland, seemed to stare sullenly at the screen, glancing now and then at the American suspects before their eyes.)
Like the Falangists, the Greek could not stand hippies. His vituperation didn’t settle down for a good ten minutes after passing another hitchhiking couple. I wondered why he had consented to pick us up (even more or less shorn) and decided that it must have been to acquire two new subordinates whose place in the divine order was beneath even his workers who, after all, had at least some connection to his own interests. Secure in the knowledge that his new underlings were not quite of the filthy sort that would soil his leather upholstery, he could proceed down the road in his new car, comfortably provided with cushions of every sort of superiority.
It occurred to me that I might experience a crisis at the border. In my passport picture I had long hair and a beard. It seemed more likely than not that the border official would comment on the change in my appearance, perhaps even question my identity. Should our volatile host he see the picture what effect might it have? (Just to overdetermine the case, in addition to my mane, I sported in the picture a necklace and a handmade Paisley vest.) Might we find ourselves stranded in the middle of the night at some chilly high pass in the Pyrenees?
As it happened, the border guards hardly glanced at our passports and we glided through into Catalonia, but the boss’s irascibility had been increasing along with his fatigue. He told the Spaniard he had to keep talking to keep the driver awake. If he couldn’t think of anything to say, he should sing. Even this stimulation proved insufficient. Suddenly he decided he had had enough. Pulling abruptly to the side of the road, he announced that we would sleep there, though we were within an hour of Barcelona. There was no discussion. We tried to settle down.
Within a very few minutes we heard snores arising from the Greek, plangent roars that seemed to strive toward greater volume with each breath. Peeking back toward our rear seat, the Spaniard saw our eyes were open. He grinned. His eyes jumped from his employer to us and sparkled merrily. He began grimacing satirically. He could be browbeaten all day, but now it was the boss who looked ridiculous. He began pulling faces, then mimicking the snores with comic exaggeration. We gratified him with obvious amusement, making common cause against the rich man, the rich man who quite abruptly came to, realized he was being made a figure of fun, and, without a word, started the car again.
He drove silently into the dark city. Though he had been offering us the hospitality of his worker’s house all day, telling us we would have some brandy, some snacks, a special bottle of wine, now those notions had vanished. He pulled to a curb in a neighborhood darker than a film noir.
“Out! Out now!” he ordered. We obeyed, trying to exchange a warm parting look on the Spaniard to show that we were on his side, though we were relieved to be leaving his boss’s company. The Greek screeched away, and we pondered our situation. We had no idea whether we were near the city center or in the suburbs. There were few lights and less traffic in a neighborhood of large old buildings divided into flats around inner courtyards. Unsure what our next move should be, we considered our options. Unexpectedly, the Greek’s car came hurtling down the street and slowed as it cruised by us. It did not stop. We walked a way at random, looking for some sign of an open business or at least another human from whom one could ask directions. The Greek came creeping by again, unwilling either to abandon us or to aid us.
As he sped around the corner, I recalled another traveler’s saying that in Spain there still were night watchmen who patrolled such precincts, carrying the huge eighteenth century keys that opened the massive, ornately carved street doors. One could summon such a person, I had been told, by clapping. So I clapped and heard the sound echo somewhere far back in the darkness. I clapped again, only half-heartedly, when I was gratified at the sight of an ancient approaching watchman, wearing what looked like robes of woolen blankets, who kindly directed us to a railroad station, always a reliable location for cheap hotels. Our route lay through the produce market, where now, an hour before daylight, the workers were setting up for the day’s trade. Their faces seemed like caricatures, lit by many small kerosene lanterns, and they were drawn to us like flies to discarded candy as we stumbled by the spectacle and exchanged a few words, but the produce was an apparition of perfection. By the time we arrived at the Park Hotel where a desk clerk was still awake the sun was coming up and I found it difficult to appreciate the comfort of a bed due to my annoyance at paying for a night which was already virtually over.
Chance had whisked us swiftly through southern France. Tomorrow we would visit Gaudí’s Park Guell and recall Orwell’s descriptions of factional fighting between the building on the Ramblas; we would eat calamari alla romana and discover a few days later that condoms were illegal (though available) in Spain where Franco still was to linger another few years. Our utter stranding while hitchhiking in Algeria was months in the future as was our fortunate falling in with a genial crew when they gave us a ride in Austria. We would have Christmas in Ibiza, spend six weeks in the cafes of Fez, and suffer losses by theft, doubtless to our fellow Americans, at the Amsterdam Youth Hostel where people puffed chillums openly and Jimi Hendrix played through the speakers. But we could guess none of that nor did we try. We lay in a cheap Spanish hotel – secure in youth -- welcoming the approach of an obscure future.
Some days later we selected a spot near the Cité Universitaire in Paris, heading, we hoped, toward the land of the troubadours and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. As in Morocco, Amsterdam, and Ibiza, we felt as though we were working through the itinerary of the hip version of a Cook’s Tour. Every utility pole in the area was covered by the comments of travelers like ourselves, not infrequently lamenting the lack of a ride. One said “What kind of a shithole is this?” though another counseled “When you feel down think where you are and where others are. Love and peace, Jane, Miranda, and Sher September 1970.” Many of our predecessors had, it seems, enjoyed ample leisure to linger in Paris and philosophize a bit before departing, and yet they had all eventually moved on, and we did as well, pausing in Lyons for a few days before heading further south.
Hitchhiking puts more than the traveler’s schedule at risk. Part of its charm is marginality. In America and elsewhere, while it may be tolerated, it invariably attracts suspicion. From our post on the on-ramp of the autoroute, we saw the cops coming. Though we dropped our thumbs out of respect, the gesture was useless. We were apprehended, questioned, and driven to the local station where the officers diverted themselves, going through our backpacks thoroughly, inspecting each item and then passing it around their circle. They took the most curious interest in our belongings. The excuse may have been to search for cannabis or weapons or poached truffles, but they seemed to be simply passing the time of day on a slow afternoon. I am afraid their rewards were few. One was delighted to come upon some condoms which he held in the air, brightening the entire mood and attracting a flurry of witty comments. Finding a recorder, a gendarme asked Patricia to play, and she managed to pipe out a creditable version of the Marseillaise. We now had the officers on our side, but not until all were thoroughly bored did they issue a ticket, assess a fine, and kindly drive us back to the on-ramp to continue awaiting a ride.
It was by then deep into the afternoon and we were pleased when, after a relatively short interval, a dark and gleaming luxury car, as though just arriving out of a dream, pulled to the side and the inviting door opened. We were not only on our way; we were in a factory-fresh Mercedes, just purchased by our driver, a small middle-aged Greek business owner with the pencil moustache of a leading man of the twenties or a villain of the thirties. To break in the new engine, he had decided to drive from his home in Germany to Spain and back. He was accompanied by an employee, the pleasant and strapping young fellow who had waved us in. The worker’s family lived in Barcelona, and the pair meant to stop there before turning around and heading back.
We appreciated the car’s fine suspension system as we cruised through southern France. The entire side of an outbuilding set among vines was painted with the visage of Louis Pasteur along with his enthusiastic recommendation of wine as not only the “healthiest” but also the most “health-giving” of drinks. Our sightseeing was punctuated by increasing outbursts of imperial irritability from our driver who exercised the last full measure of capitalist privilege, while the younger man was quietly compliant and submissive, patient as well, as the day wore on.
Among our host’s displays of ill-temper, he fulminated now and then against the hippies. In the fall of 1970 none were more aware than we that the crest in the masses now considering themselves in some way counter-cultural had coincided with a strength in the dollar, modest airfares, and a re-imagining of the old post-university Grand Tour, resulting in what must have struck Europeans as unseemly crowds of shabby semi-indigent young American tourists with backpacks. (Later, when we took a ferry to Ibiza, our cheap seats were in a large lounge where a Franco government channel played for hours on the television, warning the righteous Catholic Spaniards about the corruption that dissolute young addicts were bringing to their country. Patricia and I stood to the side while the other passengers, a working class bunch returning home for the Christmas holidays after working on the mainland, seemed to stare sullenly at the screen, glancing now and then at the American suspects before their eyes.)
Like the Falangists, the Greek could not stand hippies. His vituperation didn’t settle down for a good ten minutes after passing another hitchhiking couple. I wondered why he had consented to pick us up (even more or less shorn) and decided that it must have been to acquire two new subordinates whose place in the divine order was beneath even his workers who, after all, had at least some connection to his own interests. Secure in the knowledge that his new underlings were not quite of the filthy sort that would soil his leather upholstery, he could proceed down the road in his new car, comfortably provided with cushions of every sort of superiority.
It occurred to me that I might experience a crisis at the border. In my passport picture I had long hair and a beard. It seemed more likely than not that the border official would comment on the change in my appearance, perhaps even question my identity. Should our volatile host he see the picture what effect might it have? (Just to overdetermine the case, in addition to my mane, I sported in the picture a necklace and a handmade Paisley vest.) Might we find ourselves stranded in the middle of the night at some chilly high pass in the Pyrenees?
As it happened, the border guards hardly glanced at our passports and we glided through into Catalonia, but the boss’s irascibility had been increasing along with his fatigue. He told the Spaniard he had to keep talking to keep the driver awake. If he couldn’t think of anything to say, he should sing. Even this stimulation proved insufficient. Suddenly he decided he had had enough. Pulling abruptly to the side of the road, he announced that we would sleep there, though we were within an hour of Barcelona. There was no discussion. We tried to settle down.
Within a very few minutes we heard snores arising from the Greek, plangent roars that seemed to strive toward greater volume with each breath. Peeking back toward our rear seat, the Spaniard saw our eyes were open. He grinned. His eyes jumped from his employer to us and sparkled merrily. He began grimacing satirically. He could be browbeaten all day, but now it was the boss who looked ridiculous. He began pulling faces, then mimicking the snores with comic exaggeration. We gratified him with obvious amusement, making common cause against the rich man, the rich man who quite abruptly came to, realized he was being made a figure of fun, and, without a word, started the car again.
He drove silently into the dark city. Though he had been offering us the hospitality of his worker’s house all day, telling us we would have some brandy, some snacks, a special bottle of wine, now those notions had vanished. He pulled to a curb in a neighborhood darker than a film noir.
“Out! Out now!” he ordered. We obeyed, trying to exchange a warm parting look on the Spaniard to show that we were on his side, though we were relieved to be leaving his boss’s company. The Greek screeched away, and we pondered our situation. We had no idea whether we were near the city center or in the suburbs. There were few lights and less traffic in a neighborhood of large old buildings divided into flats around inner courtyards. Unsure what our next move should be, we considered our options. Unexpectedly, the Greek’s car came hurtling down the street and slowed as it cruised by us. It did not stop. We walked a way at random, looking for some sign of an open business or at least another human from whom one could ask directions. The Greek came creeping by again, unwilling either to abandon us or to aid us.
As he sped around the corner, I recalled another traveler’s saying that in Spain there still were night watchmen who patrolled such precincts, carrying the huge eighteenth century keys that opened the massive, ornately carved street doors. One could summon such a person, I had been told, by clapping. So I clapped and heard the sound echo somewhere far back in the darkness. I clapped again, only half-heartedly, when I was gratified at the sight of an ancient approaching watchman, wearing what looked like robes of woolen blankets, who kindly directed us to a railroad station, always a reliable location for cheap hotels. Our route lay through the produce market, where now, an hour before daylight, the workers were setting up for the day’s trade. Their faces seemed like caricatures, lit by many small kerosene lanterns, and they were drawn to us like flies to discarded candy as we stumbled by the spectacle and exchanged a few words, but the produce was an apparition of perfection. By the time we arrived at the Park Hotel where a desk clerk was still awake the sun was coming up and I found it difficult to appreciate the comfort of a bed due to my annoyance at paying for a night which was already virtually over.
Chance had whisked us swiftly through southern France. Tomorrow we would visit Gaudí’s Park Guell and recall Orwell’s descriptions of factional fighting between the building on the Ramblas; we would eat calamari alla romana and discover a few days later that condoms were illegal (though available) in Spain where Franco still was to linger another few years. Our utter stranding while hitchhiking in Algeria was months in the future as was our fortunate falling in with a genial crew when they gave us a ride in Austria. We would have Christmas in Ibiza, spend six weeks in the cafes of Fez, and suffer losses by theft, doubtless to our fellow Americans, at the Amsterdam Youth Hostel where people puffed chillums openly and Jimi Hendrix played through the speakers. But we could guess none of that nor did we try. We lay in a cheap Spanish hotel – secure in youth -- welcoming the approach of an obscure future.
Figures of Love in Lydgate’s Temple of Glas
Brackets contain footnotes; numbers in parentheses refer to line numbers in John Norton Smith’s Oxford Press edition of Lydgate’s Poems.
John Lydgate’s Temple of Glas sketches a definition of love in a leisurely, discursive manner. Talking about love, especially complaining about love, seems far more important than love itself. The precise circumstances of the characters, including the dreamer/narrator remain elusive, and the plentiful use of flores rhetoricae (rhetorical flowers or figures), while they clearly mark the text as literary, often strike the modern reader more as obstacles than aids to understanding. Further, Lydgate is a leading practitioner (though by no means the first or last) of aureate diction, the use of words of Latin (or French) rather than Germanic origin (the sort once called Saxon). [1] Apart from the transformation in readers’ reception of poetic devices that once seemed elegant and artful yet which may now strike many as artificial and distracting, Lydgate’s mere volume of work is daunting. He wrote almost a hundred and fifty thousand lines, perhaps the largest oeuvre of any English poet.
One might expect scholarly influences in Lydgate who was educated at Bury St. Edmund’s where he is later thought to have founded a school of rhetoric for lay nobles. His learning impressed his own era, and his reputation remained high for several generations after his death. Stephen Hawes in The Pastime of Pleasure (1509) praises him as an “experte in poetry” and a “floure of eloquence” whose “termes eloquent” and “clowdy figures” are the very glories of his work. Fifty years later he is to John Bale the greatest writer of the age for his erudition and eloquence [2], yet he was already becoming a specialized taste. The straightforward and colloquial Skelton says in “Phillip Sparrowe” that he has difficulty finding “the sentence of [Lydgate’s] mynde” “he wryteth too haute.” [3]
Many readers have commented that much of the story is obscure. The relations between the dreamer and the male and female figures he observes are never clarified, nor do many specific details of their frustrations emerge. From the opening lines describing the speaker’s mood of depression, Lydgate lingers on the subjective, the lovers’ feelings rather than specific narrative events. Indeed, the powerful love-longing the characters experience is very closely paired with the impediments they encounter. Only when the blinding sun of desire is temporarily dimmed can the speaker really observe his surroundings. For the most part, the work proceeds through allusion and indirection. To J. Allen Mitchell, the work is “enigmatic” [4] For Schick, Lydgate’s poetry was at its best when most conventional. He admires the “vitiated” and “overwrought” initial description of the lady. [5]
When the dreamer first enters Venus’ temple, a remarkable transparent structure, “like ise ifrore,” “clere as eny crystal,” (20, 22) he observes on every wall, the “faire image” of celebrated lovers (45) “lifli” and “wonder fresh,” though “with compleynt” and “doleful chere.” (51-2) None is represented in an attitude of satisfaction and, though they decorate the Temple of Venus, several have little to do with romantic love. Nonetheless, standing at the opening of the poems, just after the dreamer’s passing through the mysterious wicket, this series of allusive portraits introduces and epitomizes his theme. Though they seem to be purely decorative and adventitious, their constellation in fact defines the topic of love in a precise if complex way. In a set piece of a hundred lines which seems to impede development since nothing happens, Lydgate provides a rich symbolic presentation of love in which the courtly plays only a limited part.
The figures themselves could be called courtly, though, in the sense that they provide prestigious ornamentation, catering to an educated elite, demonstrating the author’s mastery of his poetic craft (in which tropes, the “flowers of rhetoric,” play so great a part) as well as his familiarity with Classical literature. Of the twenty-two famous lovers depicted in the temple, eighteen derive from Classical Greece and Rome, lending the authority of both their sheer antiquity and the suggestive intertextuality of their associations with the poems of the ancients.
As artworks they signify beauty and link to a long tradition of ekphrasis. [6] Venus herself is represented anadyomene, rising from the sea, her initial appearance in the poem corresponding to her origin in myth. This is the first of many of the goddess’ transformations in Lydgate’s poems, but it is already conflicted, linking associations of danger and distress and the fear of pre-creation chaos with moist sexuality and pleasure. (53) [7]
Though called “sondri louers” (46) comparable to suitors before a court of love such as Eleanor of Aquitaine was said to have held in Poitiers, their situations are various indeed. Immediately following the list of lovers represented on the temple’s walls, one learns that they represent a great many others. Indeed, the temple precincts are said to be crowded with thousands of people who have come to present appeals to Venus (143–246). Behind this host is, of course, the poem’s readers and humanity in general, whose pains of love may be assumed to be mirrored in the Classical images.
Most indeed lament an unrequited affection, often with the most severe consequences. Fully seven of the characters die, their passion proving literally lethal. [8] Dido. Medea, Ariadne, and Phyllis were jilted, while Thisbe and Canacee encounter other obstacles. Most striking in deviance from any concept of romantic love are the victims of rape: the Sabine women, Lucretia, Daphne, Europa, Alkmene, and, most powerfully, Philomena. The authority of Venus for Lydgate extends even to aggressive and violent acts.
As for fulfillment in love, five faithful wives are mentioned, but of those five, Alcestis and Lucretia die, while Griselda is subjected to monstrous fraud. Penelope is the only real icon of marital satisfaction, while Philology is a special case which requires separate consideration. Iseult and Helen are adulterers, highly admired though tragic heroines of extra-marital love of the sort celebrated (and then condemned) by Andreas Capellanus. Only Penelope projects a remnant of a possibility of a happy marriage.
Philology, placed last among the figures, also suggests harmonious stability, but she is far too much an abstraction to be taken for anyone’s lived experience. Her appearance to cap Lydgate’s list implies the elusiveness, if not the impossibility, of a wholly successful love affair. In Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Mercury is refused by Wisdom, Divination, and the Soul before successfully courting Philology. Though final knowledge, the future, and an essential ego may escape us, we have still books, we have still words. Though they prove only a mirror, a mirror is a marvelous tool. Since the reader encounters Philology while consuming Lydgate’s text, the case is made. Author and audience are at one. The fittest love is love of words, philology.
The only figure after that of Philology is Canacee. By this reference, Lydgate reinforces his point about reading, nodding, as he does on other occasions, to his debt to Master Chaucer, thus including modern as well as ancient literature and learning in his purview. Not only has Philology been “istellified” (136) for her “sapience.” She has also managed to capture the author as well as the reader in a self-reflective mirror. Love may be obscure in its origins and direction, it may prove unmanageable or shipwreck in a storm or suffer attack from pirates. The celibate monk Lydgate points in the end to the faithful wife Philology as the most worthy lover of all.
1. Orwell objected to such language in modern times in his “Politics and the English Language,” saying Latinate words are characteristic of “bad writers.” Even today learned authors, even in the sciences, and even when technical terms are not counted, far outpace popular ones in their use of words of Greek and Latin derivation. Theophrastus in On Diction uses the term hellenismos, later in Latin called latinitas, to mean correctness. Of course the classical authors were writing in Greek and Latin. Thus a more direct equivalent in English would have been the use of Germanic words descended from Old English. A good survey is available in John Cooper Mendenhall’s Aureate Terms: A Study in Literary Diction of the Fifteenth Century.
Appreciators of literary vituperation will relish Joseph Ritson’s devastating 1802 attack on Lydgate in his Bibliographica Poetica, calling him a “voluminous, prosaick, and driveling monk” whose “stupid and fatiguing productions ... by no means deserve the name of poetry ... are neither worth collecting ... nor even worthy of preservation.”
2. In the Scriptorum Illustrium Majoris Brytannie Quam nunc Angliam et Scotiam Vocant: Catalogus.
3. ll. 804 ff. It is plain that even in Skelton’s time Lydgate’s meaning was obscured by his style.
4. Mitchell edited the poem for the Medieval Institute edition.
5. Page cxxxv, Early English Text Society edition. Still, Schick considered the poems’ poetic value as a whole to be “very small, almost nil,” (xiv)
6. Books two and three of the Greek Anthology, for instance, are made up of ekphrastic poems. The Homeric description of the Shield of Achilles (Iliad, XVIII), Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “In the Spouter Inn” of Moby Dick are other examples.
7. She appears also as one of the lovers. (126-8)
8. Dido, Adonis, Iseult, Thisbe, Phyllis, Polyxena, and Lucretia.
John Lydgate’s Temple of Glas sketches a definition of love in a leisurely, discursive manner. Talking about love, especially complaining about love, seems far more important than love itself. The precise circumstances of the characters, including the dreamer/narrator remain elusive, and the plentiful use of flores rhetoricae (rhetorical flowers or figures), while they clearly mark the text as literary, often strike the modern reader more as obstacles than aids to understanding. Further, Lydgate is a leading practitioner (though by no means the first or last) of aureate diction, the use of words of Latin (or French) rather than Germanic origin (the sort once called Saxon). [1] Apart from the transformation in readers’ reception of poetic devices that once seemed elegant and artful yet which may now strike many as artificial and distracting, Lydgate’s mere volume of work is daunting. He wrote almost a hundred and fifty thousand lines, perhaps the largest oeuvre of any English poet.
One might expect scholarly influences in Lydgate who was educated at Bury St. Edmund’s where he is later thought to have founded a school of rhetoric for lay nobles. His learning impressed his own era, and his reputation remained high for several generations after his death. Stephen Hawes in The Pastime of Pleasure (1509) praises him as an “experte in poetry” and a “floure of eloquence” whose “termes eloquent” and “clowdy figures” are the very glories of his work. Fifty years later he is to John Bale the greatest writer of the age for his erudition and eloquence [2], yet he was already becoming a specialized taste. The straightforward and colloquial Skelton says in “Phillip Sparrowe” that he has difficulty finding “the sentence of [Lydgate’s] mynde” “he wryteth too haute.” [3]
Many readers have commented that much of the story is obscure. The relations between the dreamer and the male and female figures he observes are never clarified, nor do many specific details of their frustrations emerge. From the opening lines describing the speaker’s mood of depression, Lydgate lingers on the subjective, the lovers’ feelings rather than specific narrative events. Indeed, the powerful love-longing the characters experience is very closely paired with the impediments they encounter. Only when the blinding sun of desire is temporarily dimmed can the speaker really observe his surroundings. For the most part, the work proceeds through allusion and indirection. To J. Allen Mitchell, the work is “enigmatic” [4] For Schick, Lydgate’s poetry was at its best when most conventional. He admires the “vitiated” and “overwrought” initial description of the lady. [5]
When the dreamer first enters Venus’ temple, a remarkable transparent structure, “like ise ifrore,” “clere as eny crystal,” (20, 22) he observes on every wall, the “faire image” of celebrated lovers (45) “lifli” and “wonder fresh,” though “with compleynt” and “doleful chere.” (51-2) None is represented in an attitude of satisfaction and, though they decorate the Temple of Venus, several have little to do with romantic love. Nonetheless, standing at the opening of the poems, just after the dreamer’s passing through the mysterious wicket, this series of allusive portraits introduces and epitomizes his theme. Though they seem to be purely decorative and adventitious, their constellation in fact defines the topic of love in a precise if complex way. In a set piece of a hundred lines which seems to impede development since nothing happens, Lydgate provides a rich symbolic presentation of love in which the courtly plays only a limited part.
The figures themselves could be called courtly, though, in the sense that they provide prestigious ornamentation, catering to an educated elite, demonstrating the author’s mastery of his poetic craft (in which tropes, the “flowers of rhetoric,” play so great a part) as well as his familiarity with Classical literature. Of the twenty-two famous lovers depicted in the temple, eighteen derive from Classical Greece and Rome, lending the authority of both their sheer antiquity and the suggestive intertextuality of their associations with the poems of the ancients.
As artworks they signify beauty and link to a long tradition of ekphrasis. [6] Venus herself is represented anadyomene, rising from the sea, her initial appearance in the poem corresponding to her origin in myth. This is the first of many of the goddess’ transformations in Lydgate’s poems, but it is already conflicted, linking associations of danger and distress and the fear of pre-creation chaos with moist sexuality and pleasure. (53) [7]
Though called “sondri louers” (46) comparable to suitors before a court of love such as Eleanor of Aquitaine was said to have held in Poitiers, their situations are various indeed. Immediately following the list of lovers represented on the temple’s walls, one learns that they represent a great many others. Indeed, the temple precincts are said to be crowded with thousands of people who have come to present appeals to Venus (143–246). Behind this host is, of course, the poem’s readers and humanity in general, whose pains of love may be assumed to be mirrored in the Classical images.
Most indeed lament an unrequited affection, often with the most severe consequences. Fully seven of the characters die, their passion proving literally lethal. [8] Dido. Medea, Ariadne, and Phyllis were jilted, while Thisbe and Canacee encounter other obstacles. Most striking in deviance from any concept of romantic love are the victims of rape: the Sabine women, Lucretia, Daphne, Europa, Alkmene, and, most powerfully, Philomena. The authority of Venus for Lydgate extends even to aggressive and violent acts.
As for fulfillment in love, five faithful wives are mentioned, but of those five, Alcestis and Lucretia die, while Griselda is subjected to monstrous fraud. Penelope is the only real icon of marital satisfaction, while Philology is a special case which requires separate consideration. Iseult and Helen are adulterers, highly admired though tragic heroines of extra-marital love of the sort celebrated (and then condemned) by Andreas Capellanus. Only Penelope projects a remnant of a possibility of a happy marriage.
Philology, placed last among the figures, also suggests harmonious stability, but she is far too much an abstraction to be taken for anyone’s lived experience. Her appearance to cap Lydgate’s list implies the elusiveness, if not the impossibility, of a wholly successful love affair. In Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Mercury is refused by Wisdom, Divination, and the Soul before successfully courting Philology. Though final knowledge, the future, and an essential ego may escape us, we have still books, we have still words. Though they prove only a mirror, a mirror is a marvelous tool. Since the reader encounters Philology while consuming Lydgate’s text, the case is made. Author and audience are at one. The fittest love is love of words, philology.
The only figure after that of Philology is Canacee. By this reference, Lydgate reinforces his point about reading, nodding, as he does on other occasions, to his debt to Master Chaucer, thus including modern as well as ancient literature and learning in his purview. Not only has Philology been “istellified” (136) for her “sapience.” She has also managed to capture the author as well as the reader in a self-reflective mirror. Love may be obscure in its origins and direction, it may prove unmanageable or shipwreck in a storm or suffer attack from pirates. The celibate monk Lydgate points in the end to the faithful wife Philology as the most worthy lover of all.
1. Orwell objected to such language in modern times in his “Politics and the English Language,” saying Latinate words are characteristic of “bad writers.” Even today learned authors, even in the sciences, and even when technical terms are not counted, far outpace popular ones in their use of words of Greek and Latin derivation. Theophrastus in On Diction uses the term hellenismos, later in Latin called latinitas, to mean correctness. Of course the classical authors were writing in Greek and Latin. Thus a more direct equivalent in English would have been the use of Germanic words descended from Old English. A good survey is available in John Cooper Mendenhall’s Aureate Terms: A Study in Literary Diction of the Fifteenth Century.
Appreciators of literary vituperation will relish Joseph Ritson’s devastating 1802 attack on Lydgate in his Bibliographica Poetica, calling him a “voluminous, prosaick, and driveling monk” whose “stupid and fatiguing productions ... by no means deserve the name of poetry ... are neither worth collecting ... nor even worthy of preservation.”
2. In the Scriptorum Illustrium Majoris Brytannie Quam nunc Angliam et Scotiam Vocant: Catalogus.
3. ll. 804 ff. It is plain that even in Skelton’s time Lydgate’s meaning was obscured by his style.
4. Mitchell edited the poem for the Medieval Institute edition.
5. Page cxxxv, Early English Text Society edition. Still, Schick considered the poems’ poetic value as a whole to be “very small, almost nil,” (xiv)
6. Books two and three of the Greek Anthology, for instance, are made up of ekphrastic poems. The Homeric description of the Shield of Achilles (Iliad, XVIII), Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “In the Spouter Inn” of Moby Dick are other examples.
7. She appears also as one of the lovers. (126-8)
8. Dido, Adonis, Iseult, Thisbe, Phyllis, Polyxena, and Lucretia.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Journey to the North
I use Wade-Giles romanization following the practice of Gary Seaman’s Journey to the North (Berkeley: University of California, 1987). The self-indulgent digression on Modern Library Giants has, I am aware, little excuse. I might argue that biblio-nostalgia is the more useful as books are ever more eclipsed.
It is a curiosity of literature that, whereas early European works of fiction masqueraded as fact [1], in Chinese fiction overtly fantastic elements play an important role. There is, nonetheless, a continuum from the recording of precise details of everyday life in The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P’ing Mei) or the Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong Lou Meng) to utterly implausible tales such as the Journey to the West (Hsi Yu Ki or Monkey, in Waley’s version) with material drawn from fanciful folktales. The anonymous Journey to the North (Pei Yu Chi) translated by Gary Seaman falls clearly into the latter category. Though Seaman includes an “ethnohistorical analysis,” his work rewards the common reader as well as the specialist, with its stories of marvels staged around the borderline of the divine and human realms.
Just as in the West, the novel in Chinese has had a long path to literary respectability. Written in vernacular rather than literary language and often arising from oral narratives, until the twentieth century, fiction could not aspire to the prestige of poetry. [2] Still, for the reader fatigued with the pellucid nature images and intricate intertextuality of Chinese poetry and the terrifically challenging conundrums of the Zen masters, Ming and Ching fiction continues to offer first-rate entertainment, whether from a realism that reminds the Western reader of Balzac or a fantastic imagination something like the world of the Odyssey.
I myself have always felt a particular kinship with a broad range of the old Chinese poets and storytellers. [3] Reading Chuang Tzu or Wang Wei I have the illusion that the cultural and temporal distance between me and these old worthies has vanished. As a child I read Joseph Gaer’s How the Great Religions Began and the Life book The World’s Great Religions, which allowed my belated sensibility to glimpse now and then a numinous glow in spite of my rejection of my culture’s Christianity. While fascinated by the theater and complexity of Indian myth and the powerful hammerblows of the Buddha’s story, I felt at once most at home with Lao Tzu. In that grand period of inexpensive classics, I soon progressed to certain Dover reprints of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East series and to a Modern Library giant, Lin Yutang’s The Wisdom of China and India.
(The Modern Library giants, for many years of my youth, cost $2.95. Lin’s book had almost eleven hundred pages. Could there have been a better bargain? I value still my copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essayes and a complete Donne and Blake bound up together, as are Keats and Shelley – what dizzying riches! I have others as well. A copy of Ulysses, once a close companion, now unread for decades, a complete Lewis Carroll which served me and two younger generations to date, complete novels and selected tales of Hawthorne, but Lin’s is the one to which I have returned more often than any other. It was in this most accessible form that I first encountered the Vedas, the Ramayana, Shen Fu’s Floating Life, and even Lu Xun [or Lusin as he is called here].)
Grateful as I must be to Lin (and to Waley and Pound and D. T. Suzuki, among others), as a popular work, the volume is at times, reductive, even misleading. In introducing the Chinese texts in his anthology, Lin notes the influence of the social Confucian “religion” and comments that China is generally regarded as “human, rational, and easily understandable,” more pointedly, “non-mystical.” [4] Lin does differ from this supposed consensus in several ways, but in fact Chinese writing of every era except the most recent has gloried in a vast body of fanciful supernaturalism.
Though philosophical Taoism may well seem a sort of “natural religion” even when borne aloft by a certain afflatus, popular Taoism has always offered magicians, alchemy, divination, and an elaborate cast of supernatural beings. Zen (chan in Chinese) may itself face life straight on, offering the most austere of practices, but in China it became conflated with Pure Land Amidism (Jìngtǔzōng) which imagines access through the recitation of a spell to a fabulous realm with all sorts of exotic divinities, flora and fauna. Much Chinese fiction consists of stories of sorcerers, ghosts, gods, fairies, and semi-divine figures of all sorts [5] and even the histories commonly feature interventions from heaven and other fantastic explanations. While it is difficult to determine to what extent author and audience accepted these marvels literally, [6] they contribute whimsy, entertainment, and metaphorical value. Surely such fanciful tales have a good deal in common with the horror and science fiction films of today.
The Journey to the West (Pei-yu chi), an anonymous novel published in its current form in the early 17th century, [7] originally appeared as one of a set of four journey narratives, one for each direction. [8] The book contains wonders enough for any fantasy film fan. Not only amazing transformations, but the most peculiar self-confrontations insist that even one’s own ego, the last retreat against the skeptic, may be questioned, divided, and exploded. The human reincarnation of the heavenly ruler, the Jade Emperor, practices austerities with such assiduity that he fails to notice when his guts are removed. His stomach becomes an independently acting turtle demon and his intestines a snake demon. (112) His meditations are so effective that the Emperor promotes him in a bureaucratic interoffice memo to “the ranks of Heavenly officials.” [9] Conquering his own innards, he makes them his generals in the service of order and virtue.
Chen Wu is repeatedly characterized as a sort of intermediary between heaven and earth. In one version [10] he is a reformed sinner, a butcher who attracts the attention of Kuan Yin when he wraps his cleaver in his own bowels before tossing it to ensure that it is not used for slaughter in the future. In the Journey to the North he appears as the Jade Emperor, a heavenly ruler who nonetheless willfully descends to a human consciousness since he covets a beautiful plaything. At times his celestial form communicates with his human one. (109) Despite his superhuman status, he not only may be tempted; he can also be injured (132). The same is true of other figures. Kuan Yü, for example, though an immortal, still studies sutras to continue on the road to enlightenment. (134-5)
Furthermore, the book’s translator, an anthropologist, seeks at length to demonstrate that the text is a transcription of spirit voices delivered through a shamanic medium. Whether this be in fact true or not, the book confines itself for the most part to Amazing Stories [11], while there is little of revelation or moral exhortation. The primary focus, judging from internal evidence and much of Seaman’s own contemporary findings, is to establish the bona fides of Chen Wu, the true warrior, a deity also called the Emperor of the Dark Heavens (Hsüan-t’ien Shang-ti), worshipped at Wu-tang Shan in Hupei Province and in a great many other temples. His authority is manifested in episodes resembling other superheroes, vanquishing one foe after another, while occasionally lapsing into weakness himself and slipping through his own error some rungs down the karmic ladder. He continues to climb, though, and his setbacks doubtless only endear a divinity to the fallible human, while his every triumph is a sort of plaintive wish for similar success on the more contested earthly field.
The notion that narrative arises when the divine and the mundane mix is symbolically represented in a number of Chinese novels. For instance, the text of the Dream of the Red Chamber is supposed to be transcribed from a divine stone descended to earth to enter human form, and Water Margin’s hundred and eight heroes are onetime demonic overlords, now repentant and reborn as virtuous outlaws. Sun Wukong in Journey to the West is repeatedly exiled from celestial realms only to be readmitted until his ordeal-filled quest to fetch scriptures if finally successful. As in the Hebrew scriptures, it is when the divine and the human interact that action follows. Before the Fall, Eden must have been altogether uneventful.
If one is to accept Seaman’s theory of the ritual role of the story, Chen Wu is a sort of culture hero/savior/granter of wishes, a wonder-working yet accessible deity not unlike Jesus. He is said to have subdued the malign forces just as he had defeated the barbarians (112), even if the latter campaign seems more to do with worldly goals than with enlightenment. Despite the rarified air of frothy fairy fancies, the hero returns to the human-centered Confucian values of filial piety and just rule. (86)
In one of the most striking images of the book Chen Wu, in the role of the Venerable Teacher who has abdicated rule to pursue meditation in the mountains, encounters an old woman rubbing an iron pole on a boulder with the aim of wearing it down to an embroidery needle (102). Next an old man “pecking” at a cliff with an awl, intending to construct a canal tells his that “the heart is harder than stone.” (103) He persists in his work. The image encapsulates the vision of the virtual impossibility of achievement in the human realm while insisting on the value of constant striving, the continual if never wholly successful effort to exert one’s will in the face of what Marvell called “the iron gates of life.”
The reader of this volume appreciates Wu Cheng-en’s Journey to the West all the more for its clear focus throughout on enlightenment and its consistently scintillating humor. Though the Journey to the North is a markedly less satisfying narrative, it shares to some extent Wu’s delight in wonders and his absolute confidence in the rightness of the cosmos. Here Taoism is a wondrous intersection of philosophy, superstition, and a delightfully whimsical play of imagination.
Yet the book amounts to something more eloquent and poignant than entertainment. For me the current popular cult practice Seaman studied in which Chen Wu is yet today the goal of pilgrimages, the patron of exorcisms, the prophetic voice that continues to speak through the mouths of possessed shamans is more significant than any of the cult’s details. The story’s simple reinforcing fables, so repetitively iterated, constitute a sort of entertainment that reinforces cult practices and social attitudes through a simple sympathetic magic. Our hero wins, and thus we all win. Retributive justice prevails in spite of upheavals and struggles. As in any superhero story, the end is never really in doubt. Surely the people Seaman accompanied on pilgrimages to temples of Chen Wu in Taiwan were seeking similar reassurance. If such supernatural reassurance escapes the contemporary reader, he can still appreciate the deeply human yearning behind such a wildly fabulous story, and join with Chen Wu’s devotees in relishing a ripping tale.
1. All the epistolary novels include this pretense of lived reality as do works like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, and many others.
2. Lu Hsun’s A Brief History of Chinese Fiction provides a detailed historical account.
3. Lao-Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Lieh Tzu remain for me the wisest sages. I count a small group of Tang Dynasty Buddhist poets among the world’s greatest. I find in the Transmission of the Lamp (Ching-te Ch'uan teng lu) the most profound sublimity. The appeal of Confucius and Szu-ma Chien continues to elude me.
4. See page 567, though in his introduction to “Chinese Tales” (937) he notes that “Chinese literature abounds in tales of ghosts, goblins, fox spirits, genii, and double personalities.”
5. Ling kuai is the genre of specifically supernatural narratives.
6. The same problem, of course, exists in European texts. While Homer, Sappho, and Hesiod are likely to have been religious “fundamentalists” in this sense, what of Euripedes, Plato, or Ovid?
7. Yü Hsiang-tou was apparently the editor and publisher, the source of several interpolations. See Seaman’s introduction, also published as “The Divine Authorship of Pei-yu chi [Journey to the North]” in the Journal of Asian Studies, XLV, 3 (May 1986), 483-497.
8. Ssu-yu chi, the four journeys. Among them is a version of the story of Monkey, the Journey to the West.
9. p. 109.
10. See Seaman’s introduction, page 2.
11. Amazing Stories was the pioneering pulp magazine first published by Hugo Gernsback in 1926.
It is a curiosity of literature that, whereas early European works of fiction masqueraded as fact [1], in Chinese fiction overtly fantastic elements play an important role. There is, nonetheless, a continuum from the recording of precise details of everyday life in The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P’ing Mei) or the Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong Lou Meng) to utterly implausible tales such as the Journey to the West (Hsi Yu Ki or Monkey, in Waley’s version) with material drawn from fanciful folktales. The anonymous Journey to the North (Pei Yu Chi) translated by Gary Seaman falls clearly into the latter category. Though Seaman includes an “ethnohistorical analysis,” his work rewards the common reader as well as the specialist, with its stories of marvels staged around the borderline of the divine and human realms.
Just as in the West, the novel in Chinese has had a long path to literary respectability. Written in vernacular rather than literary language and often arising from oral narratives, until the twentieth century, fiction could not aspire to the prestige of poetry. [2] Still, for the reader fatigued with the pellucid nature images and intricate intertextuality of Chinese poetry and the terrifically challenging conundrums of the Zen masters, Ming and Ching fiction continues to offer first-rate entertainment, whether from a realism that reminds the Western reader of Balzac or a fantastic imagination something like the world of the Odyssey.
I myself have always felt a particular kinship with a broad range of the old Chinese poets and storytellers. [3] Reading Chuang Tzu or Wang Wei I have the illusion that the cultural and temporal distance between me and these old worthies has vanished. As a child I read Joseph Gaer’s How the Great Religions Began and the Life book The World’s Great Religions, which allowed my belated sensibility to glimpse now and then a numinous glow in spite of my rejection of my culture’s Christianity. While fascinated by the theater and complexity of Indian myth and the powerful hammerblows of the Buddha’s story, I felt at once most at home with Lao Tzu. In that grand period of inexpensive classics, I soon progressed to certain Dover reprints of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East series and to a Modern Library giant, Lin Yutang’s The Wisdom of China and India.
(The Modern Library giants, for many years of my youth, cost $2.95. Lin’s book had almost eleven hundred pages. Could there have been a better bargain? I value still my copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essayes and a complete Donne and Blake bound up together, as are Keats and Shelley – what dizzying riches! I have others as well. A copy of Ulysses, once a close companion, now unread for decades, a complete Lewis Carroll which served me and two younger generations to date, complete novels and selected tales of Hawthorne, but Lin’s is the one to which I have returned more often than any other. It was in this most accessible form that I first encountered the Vedas, the Ramayana, Shen Fu’s Floating Life, and even Lu Xun [or Lusin as he is called here].)
Grateful as I must be to Lin (and to Waley and Pound and D. T. Suzuki, among others), as a popular work, the volume is at times, reductive, even misleading. In introducing the Chinese texts in his anthology, Lin notes the influence of the social Confucian “religion” and comments that China is generally regarded as “human, rational, and easily understandable,” more pointedly, “non-mystical.” [4] Lin does differ from this supposed consensus in several ways, but in fact Chinese writing of every era except the most recent has gloried in a vast body of fanciful supernaturalism.
Though philosophical Taoism may well seem a sort of “natural religion” even when borne aloft by a certain afflatus, popular Taoism has always offered magicians, alchemy, divination, and an elaborate cast of supernatural beings. Zen (chan in Chinese) may itself face life straight on, offering the most austere of practices, but in China it became conflated with Pure Land Amidism (Jìngtǔzōng) which imagines access through the recitation of a spell to a fabulous realm with all sorts of exotic divinities, flora and fauna. Much Chinese fiction consists of stories of sorcerers, ghosts, gods, fairies, and semi-divine figures of all sorts [5] and even the histories commonly feature interventions from heaven and other fantastic explanations. While it is difficult to determine to what extent author and audience accepted these marvels literally, [6] they contribute whimsy, entertainment, and metaphorical value. Surely such fanciful tales have a good deal in common with the horror and science fiction films of today.
The Journey to the West (Pei-yu chi), an anonymous novel published in its current form in the early 17th century, [7] originally appeared as one of a set of four journey narratives, one for each direction. [8] The book contains wonders enough for any fantasy film fan. Not only amazing transformations, but the most peculiar self-confrontations insist that even one’s own ego, the last retreat against the skeptic, may be questioned, divided, and exploded. The human reincarnation of the heavenly ruler, the Jade Emperor, practices austerities with such assiduity that he fails to notice when his guts are removed. His stomach becomes an independently acting turtle demon and his intestines a snake demon. (112) His meditations are so effective that the Emperor promotes him in a bureaucratic interoffice memo to “the ranks of Heavenly officials.” [9] Conquering his own innards, he makes them his generals in the service of order and virtue.
Chen Wu is repeatedly characterized as a sort of intermediary between heaven and earth. In one version [10] he is a reformed sinner, a butcher who attracts the attention of Kuan Yin when he wraps his cleaver in his own bowels before tossing it to ensure that it is not used for slaughter in the future. In the Journey to the North he appears as the Jade Emperor, a heavenly ruler who nonetheless willfully descends to a human consciousness since he covets a beautiful plaything. At times his celestial form communicates with his human one. (109) Despite his superhuman status, he not only may be tempted; he can also be injured (132). The same is true of other figures. Kuan Yü, for example, though an immortal, still studies sutras to continue on the road to enlightenment. (134-5)
Furthermore, the book’s translator, an anthropologist, seeks at length to demonstrate that the text is a transcription of spirit voices delivered through a shamanic medium. Whether this be in fact true or not, the book confines itself for the most part to Amazing Stories [11], while there is little of revelation or moral exhortation. The primary focus, judging from internal evidence and much of Seaman’s own contemporary findings, is to establish the bona fides of Chen Wu, the true warrior, a deity also called the Emperor of the Dark Heavens (Hsüan-t’ien Shang-ti), worshipped at Wu-tang Shan in Hupei Province and in a great many other temples. His authority is manifested in episodes resembling other superheroes, vanquishing one foe after another, while occasionally lapsing into weakness himself and slipping through his own error some rungs down the karmic ladder. He continues to climb, though, and his setbacks doubtless only endear a divinity to the fallible human, while his every triumph is a sort of plaintive wish for similar success on the more contested earthly field.
The notion that narrative arises when the divine and the mundane mix is symbolically represented in a number of Chinese novels. For instance, the text of the Dream of the Red Chamber is supposed to be transcribed from a divine stone descended to earth to enter human form, and Water Margin’s hundred and eight heroes are onetime demonic overlords, now repentant and reborn as virtuous outlaws. Sun Wukong in Journey to the West is repeatedly exiled from celestial realms only to be readmitted until his ordeal-filled quest to fetch scriptures if finally successful. As in the Hebrew scriptures, it is when the divine and the human interact that action follows. Before the Fall, Eden must have been altogether uneventful.
If one is to accept Seaman’s theory of the ritual role of the story, Chen Wu is a sort of culture hero/savior/granter of wishes, a wonder-working yet accessible deity not unlike Jesus. He is said to have subdued the malign forces just as he had defeated the barbarians (112), even if the latter campaign seems more to do with worldly goals than with enlightenment. Despite the rarified air of frothy fairy fancies, the hero returns to the human-centered Confucian values of filial piety and just rule. (86)
In one of the most striking images of the book Chen Wu, in the role of the Venerable Teacher who has abdicated rule to pursue meditation in the mountains, encounters an old woman rubbing an iron pole on a boulder with the aim of wearing it down to an embroidery needle (102). Next an old man “pecking” at a cliff with an awl, intending to construct a canal tells his that “the heart is harder than stone.” (103) He persists in his work. The image encapsulates the vision of the virtual impossibility of achievement in the human realm while insisting on the value of constant striving, the continual if never wholly successful effort to exert one’s will in the face of what Marvell called “the iron gates of life.”
The reader of this volume appreciates Wu Cheng-en’s Journey to the West all the more for its clear focus throughout on enlightenment and its consistently scintillating humor. Though the Journey to the North is a markedly less satisfying narrative, it shares to some extent Wu’s delight in wonders and his absolute confidence in the rightness of the cosmos. Here Taoism is a wondrous intersection of philosophy, superstition, and a delightfully whimsical play of imagination.
Yet the book amounts to something more eloquent and poignant than entertainment. For me the current popular cult practice Seaman studied in which Chen Wu is yet today the goal of pilgrimages, the patron of exorcisms, the prophetic voice that continues to speak through the mouths of possessed shamans is more significant than any of the cult’s details. The story’s simple reinforcing fables, so repetitively iterated, constitute a sort of entertainment that reinforces cult practices and social attitudes through a simple sympathetic magic. Our hero wins, and thus we all win. Retributive justice prevails in spite of upheavals and struggles. As in any superhero story, the end is never really in doubt. Surely the people Seaman accompanied on pilgrimages to temples of Chen Wu in Taiwan were seeking similar reassurance. If such supernatural reassurance escapes the contemporary reader, he can still appreciate the deeply human yearning behind such a wildly fabulous story, and join with Chen Wu’s devotees in relishing a ripping tale.
1. All the epistolary novels include this pretense of lived reality as do works like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, and many others.
2. Lu Hsun’s A Brief History of Chinese Fiction provides a detailed historical account.
3. Lao-Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Lieh Tzu remain for me the wisest sages. I count a small group of Tang Dynasty Buddhist poets among the world’s greatest. I find in the Transmission of the Lamp (Ching-te Ch'uan teng lu) the most profound sublimity. The appeal of Confucius and Szu-ma Chien continues to elude me.
4. See page 567, though in his introduction to “Chinese Tales” (937) he notes that “Chinese literature abounds in tales of ghosts, goblins, fox spirits, genii, and double personalities.”
5. Ling kuai is the genre of specifically supernatural narratives.
6. The same problem, of course, exists in European texts. While Homer, Sappho, and Hesiod are likely to have been religious “fundamentalists” in this sense, what of Euripedes, Plato, or Ovid?
7. Yü Hsiang-tou was apparently the editor and publisher, the source of several interpolations. See Seaman’s introduction, also published as “The Divine Authorship of Pei-yu chi [Journey to the North]” in the Journal of Asian Studies, XLV, 3 (May 1986), 483-497.
8. Ssu-yu chi, the four journeys. Among them is a version of the story of Monkey, the Journey to the West.
9. p. 109.
10. See Seaman’s introduction, page 2.
11. Amazing Stories was the pioneering pulp magazine first published by Hugo Gernsback in 1926.
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