Pig and Possum Teach Poetry

The categorization of this piece for the Index gave me pause. Should it be memoir, as I recall childhood? Or theory of criticism, since I make a general point about poetry? Hesitating, I considered using the first category of familiar essays, but decided finally that it was fundamentally critical comment on Brooks and Kelly, two twentieth century writers, and thus belongs in the index list with other criticism of post-medieval authors.


     Because thematics are the simplest literary element to engage in class, students often consider ideas to be the stuff of poetry. The most dreadful expression in pedagogy – “What is the author trying to say?” – always suggests to me that, rather than being more skilled than most at verbal expression, the writer is tongue-tied and must struggle even to express some simple sentiment such as “the bad suffer in the end” (though the teacher has no similar difficulty). I neither believe that the writer has any privileged access to truth nor that poetry has any business conveying ideas that could be formulated much more succinctly in prose.
     My own experience suggests rather that the seed of poetry, for both the writer and the reader, is playing with words and with concepts. [1] The poet is in this way no different from the painter who likes to fiddle and manipulate forms and colors or the composer who does the same with sounds. My own poetic notebooks from adolescence contain no attempts to snare great truths or startling insights. Rather they preserve isolated words and phrases that caught my fancy and seemed worth collecting for possible future use as well as endless experimental attempts to write coherently in a wide variety of metrical forms. Sound effects – the weakest aspect of poetry these days – not only dominated for me, but they do for most young consumers of poetry.
     Nursery rhymes, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Gelett Burgess, all depend primarily on the music of words. Sound jostles with sentiment in Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses [2], but doubtless the first element was for the children and the second for their parents who had already forgotten the charm of incantatory utterance.

     Probably the most significant influences in my poetic development prior to middle school were Freddy the Pig and Pogo Possum. Walter R. Brooks wrote the Freddy books between 1927 and 1958 (they have been reissued by Overlook Press), and, though they continue to attract devoted followers among young and old, their readership has diminished considerably since their heyday in the forties and fifties when I read, I believe, the entire series. My brother James and I were devoted to Freddy. James is two years older than I and, as I recall, wrote Walter R. Brooks a fan letter. He also recommended Brooks’ work on a local library radio show featuring kids commenting on their favorite books. (It is little wonder that he is now a distinguished professor of literature.) I have distinct memory of the location to which I repeatedly returned on the Sioux City library shelves in search of a story I had not yet read.
     Apart from twenty-six Freddy the Pig books, Brooks published a good number of short stories and two novels for adults as well as working for the New Yorker where he wrote the then-anonymous “Talk of the Town.” Another of his children’s short stories has the dubious distinction of introducing the character of Mr. Ed, the talking horse, which later ran for five years on television. [3] Still, his very first publication had been a sonnet, and the pig of his imagination wrote poetry.
     On the dust jacket of The Collected Poems of Freddy the Pig (1953), Freddy wears a laurel wreath as well as an ascot and a dressing gown from Percy Dovetonsil’s wardrobe. Most of the works reprinted there had appeared in one or another of the novels and are doubtless best studied in context, but a survey of Freddy’s poetry in isolation is sufficient for my present point. Brooks’ pig favors meter and rhyme, in contradistinction to the fashions prevalent in the human poetry of the day, sometimes edging close to pure delight in sound.

Here come the caribou and kangaroos and camels,
The koodoos, zebus, zebras, and yaks.
                                          “Circus Marching Song”

The poems are sometimes free-handed in their alliteration, as in the title “Bees, Bothered by Bold Bears, Behave Badly” and through four stanzas in “P as in Pig.”

This is the song of Frederick,
Patriot, poet, and pig;
In pedigree, princely, patrician,
In appearance, both pleasing and plig.

(That final word, incidentally, receives a footnote. [4])

     His rhymes could be as inventive as Byron’s in Don Juan, linking, for instance, “necktie” with “bedecked I” (in “No. 6: The Whiskers”), “separate” (the adjective) with “pepper it” (in “No. 4: The Mouth”), and “swoop at her” with “Jupiter” (in “Flying Wings”).
     Rather than dealing with “problems,” as many children’s books have come to do – a new sibling, bullying, racial prejudice – Freddy was a poet of escapism, of dalliance in the realm of the whimsical imagination. One finds in his works an entire section devoted to independence and free wandering, praising precisely the autonomy denied to children. Freddy sings songs of the open road (not about homelessness).
     
You wash your face in the clear, cold, dew,
And you say good-night to the moon,
And the wind in the tree-tops sings you to sleep
With a drowsy boughs-y tune.
                                          “The Open Road”

     The whole point, far from clarifying the conditions of life, which children as well as adults often find difficult, is to avoid reality with a gay and sonorous leap of the fancy. The same purposes are served by a section of cowboy poems including “From the Ballad of Two-Gun Freddy” in which the pig, whose enemy Flint cowers before him on his knees, “just laughs and pulls his moustache,” then proceeds to “plug” his foe. The delights of his cowboy life go beyond cold-blooded killing, however. Contrary to the didactic mode of children’s literature (though Brooks admittedly spent a portion of his narrative time advocating standards of fifties decency), the poetic Freddy exults that the cowboy need “never use a toothbrush, never use a comb.” As a seven-year-old, that was a theme I could enjoy. In play Freddy could adopt the pose of an anti-hero who aspired to look like Struwwelpeter, while parents play little role in the Freddy books.
     Should this seem an indulgence of juvenile perversity, Freddy was capable of adult metaphysical perversity as well. Of his “Ode to Nothing,” he insists,

It seeks no meaning to convey,
It has no subject, point, or plot.
It must mean something, you will say –
But I assure you it does not.

I thought of the pig when, many years later in graduate school, I read William IX’s “Farai un vers de dreyt nien” which begins “I’ve made this verse of nothing at all.” This is not the only time I saw parallels with Freddy’s poetry during my later studies. Is not the following couplet redolent of Marvell?

Yet tho there's nothing to prevent
Bad manners in the firmament . . .
from Freddy and the Spaceship

He was capable of actual parody as well, of Scott, for instance, in “Breathes there a pig with soul so dead” (from Freddy and the Bean Home News).
     Note how Freddy in “Thoughts on Teeth” moves from the easy and obvious word “steaks” to the spicy-odd “pickled pears” and then the sweet (and toothsome) by and by “angel cakes” only to follow up with reference to Timbuctoo that conjures the imagination as well as Coleridge’s Xanadu. (For any reader seeking useful information, the same poem gets around to teaching about poultry gizzards in later verses.)

The teeth are used in chewing steaks
And pickled pears and angel cakes-
A list of all the things they chew
Would reach from here to Timbuctoo.
                                     from Freddy and Simon the Dictator

     Walt Kelly, who drew Pogo (after working for Disney Studios and doing political cartoons) from the early forties until his death in 1973 is less faded, perhaps, from popular consciousness than Brooks. His comic strip, doubtless one of the greatest ever penned, featured Kelly’s clever and precise draftsmanship, the smallest details significant, but his paramount skill was surely verbal wit. As a preteen I owned all the reprinted books. (I was faithful until I began buying Jules Feiffer’s after his collection Sick Sick Sick was published in 1958.) My own drawings of Church Lafemme and Porkypine were taped to my fifth-grade bedpost. I was delighted when, in 1956, a record titled Songs of the Pogo [5] appeared, which I promptly purchased and proceeded to memorize all the lyrics.
     I found the Okefenokee milieu an attractive vision of prelapsarian sociability, where the characters idle away their time in comradely verbal play with occasional fishing expeditions or other projects to ease them through the endless afternoons. In the “old hospitality of the land of tussock and hammock” [6] Pogo himself was a straight man, nearly as boring as the later Mickey Mouse, but his associates defined a veritable anatomy of humors: Albert the appetitive alligator whose capacious mouth seems always open, unless he is chewing on a cigar; Howland Owl, the know-nothing pedant; Churchy LaFemme, so simple and innocent in self-interest; not to mention all the rest, numbering eventually in the hundreds, each fully defined, some with not only individual voices, but with distinctive lettering in the balloons as well.
     I have recently reread the initial book, titled simply Pogo which contains strips from October 1948 to June of 1949, and most references to follow, those noted by dates, are from that volume. The high crest of Kelly’s work may have come later, but the essential elements were present from the very first.
Though the general scene was beguiling to me, clearly the unique glory of the strip was the verbal play. Kelly’s animals use a consistent idiolect, called by fans “swampspeak,” which has only a tenuous relation to Southern dialect of any sort. Critter, pot licker, mammy, git, chillun, even “hootin’ and hollerin’, possibly “easy as sugar pie” may represent real speech patterns, but Kelly was unrestrained by reality. He fancifully deformed words for the pure fun of it (differments, snicker-snackering and wiggleworming, wuxtry, fotch), introduced extra syllables in words (rackety coon, horribobble) and devised entirely new ones (rowrbazzle, poolaverate). Kelly no sooner introduces “flea talk” than he leaps another level by imagining flea talk in dialect. [7] He enjoys learned words as exotic objects: perchance, faugh, huzzah, plebian, chilblains, billets doux.
     His dialogue is constantly poetic, meters come and go, rhyme words fall as though at random, and allusions proliferate, allusions I somehow found fascinating even when I did not understand them until years later, such as the trio of bats, Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, or Simple J. Malarkey’s chilling warning, “it don't pay to tinker forever with chance. Ha Ha.” [8] (That Finnegan’s Wake remains constantly in print testifies to the lasting pleasures of consuming a semi-intelligible text.)
     Kelly is not averse to quoting Shakespeare, [9] and was partial to the same verbal games as the Elizabethan master. In Okefenokee puns pop up like bubbles in soda water. There “fission,” one of the more frightening words of the post-Hiroshima world, is conflated with the mild and pleasant pastime of “fishin’. [10] The strip approaches a “who’s on first” routine with Thomas Dewey’s surname. [11] Albert stretches language nearly to the breaking point when he groans “ivory groanin’ overalls” at Howland Owl’s vision of academia. [12]
     Though Kelly created a brilliantly innovative variation on the form, he retained the “funny animals” convention (which is, to a large extent, a broader comedy convention) that no one is really hurt or even in peril, no one is in serious need, and the animals’ failings are seen in the kindliest of lights. The characters in Pogo live in a utopian state that, were they human, might be called post-industrial. Like Pooh’s hunny pot, their larders do not seem to require replenishing. When Beauregard asks Pogo to suppose himself “coming home after a hard day’s work,” Pogo replies, “Kind of a strain on my s’poser.” [13]
     Yet their innocence is a pose. Whether one thinks Pogo looks much like an opossum or not, he finds hanging by his tail (as a letter suggests he properly ought) impossible. [14] Similarly the crane finds crane behavior unachievable. [15] In a further trope, in both these cases the “facts” about animals are contained in written documents, not observed from life, for where on the newspaper page could he find a living creature? Thus, with the exception of an occasional fish, they do not eat each other, though the possibility emerges now and then. In the very opening sequence, the benign possum unsuccessfully tries to convince a worm that to be his catfish bait is a “high class career type job.” [16] Albert, the appetitive alligator, finds first a bird and later a pollywog in his capacious mouth. [17]
     Self-reflective passages, such as characters’ mentioning their role in a comic strip, appear periodically to season and complicate the scene. A butterfly threatens to “as for a transfer” to the neighboring strip; Porkypine considers himself an “employe”; and Pogo himself says he is “a big comic strip character.” [18] Animals refer to their species as their profession.
     Such play with signified and signifier, the natural and the artificial, true and false lies at the very heart of art. The poem, the painting, the dance are composed with exuberant abstract play of sounds and concepts. I owe a childhood understanding of these fundamental elements of the aesthetic to Brooks and Kelly, each of whom constructed a world at once escapist and real. Reading the books of Freddy the Pig and Pogo the reader relishes both what is understood and what remains beyond the understanding, all the while listening to the spirited and mysterious music of words.
     I was a great library patron, but among my first paperback purchases, probably for a quarter or thirty-five cents, along with an anthology of American short stories and Henrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, was a copy of Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. My favorite piece in this last was “Ulalume,” indicating that the music of words, even splayed off from meaning, continued to captivate me. In high school I memorized most of Edith Sitwell’s Façade, and years later I found myself translating incantatory Dada lyrics with willfully bizarre imagery and studying Gorgias, the rhetorician whose speeches were praised as incantatory, hypnotic, and beautiful rather than true. I had well learned the lesson of the pig and the possum with whom I had become so well acquainted in my childhood, those wonderful animals who passed the time of day playing, investigating what machines they could build with images and words.



1. I recall how for Huizinga in Homo Ludens play was not only at the root of art, but of war and legal procedures as well.

2. Originally published as Penny Whistles.

3. The series was developed and directed by Arthur Lubin, director of the Francis the Talking Mule movies.

4. The note reads “‘Excuse me, said Freginald, ‘but what does plig mean?’
‘I made it up,’ said Freddy. ‘It just came to me. Sounds well, don’t you think?’”

5. The lyrics were by Kelly and the music by Kelly and Norman Monath.

6. 10/26/48.

7. 12/28/48.

8. Malarkey, a caricature of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, appears in The Pogo Papers.

9. An allusion to King Lear reference appears on 11/19/48 and to Julius Caesar on 11/17/48.

10. 1/3/29.

11. 11/8/48.

12. p. 1/5/49. Later a bug says he will graduate “magnolia come louder.” 11/8/48

13. 12/6/48.

14. 5/28/49.

15. 10/12/48.

16. 10/5/48, repeated 1/26/49.

17. See 10/24/48 and 6/1/49.

18. 10/20/48, 11/9/48, 11/12/48.

Notes on Recent Reading 20 [Rowe, Stevenson, Issa]

Jane Shore [Rowe]

     Nicholas Rowe had edited his acknowledged master Shakespeare, and he would perhaps not be surprised to hear that a modern reader finds his own play Jane Shore suffers by comparison. Rowe’s entire effect depends on the delicious spectacle of the set-upon lady, an appeal in vogue during his time as what the playwright called the “she-tragedy.”
     Shore’s public humiliation for promiscuity is only the most piquant instance of this commonplace yet slightly kinky taste, so common through world literature. Shore’s story is well-suited to a wheel of fortune theme as she had had, for a time, very nearly the power of a queen as well as having possessed what all regarded as extraordinary beauty and a sharp wit that led Edward to call her the “merriest” of his consorts. The plot is flat and simple in plot, the poetry thin in imagery, the sentiment almost wholly pathetic. Though words flow with energy, their moving streams are so shallow that they suggest nothing new in the course of the drama.
     In contrast to her depiction by Thomas More and Shakespeare (in Richard III), Rowe achieves his effect by treating her sympathetically, depicting her as genuinely repentant for her immorality and politically engaged in combating Richard’s usurpation of power.
     Rowe’s widow received a pension from George I in thanks for his translation of Lucan, which demonstrates that, in one way at least, that age was more civilized than our own.


The Master of Ballantrae [Stevenson]

     Were Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel a modern movie (it was originally serialized in Scribner’s and filmed at least twice), it might even be labeled a thriller. It may be a “Winter’s Tale” (as the subtitle has it) for its nearly constant suffering, relenting only to make more distinct a succession of plot turns that hold the reader until what some have considered the extravagance of the final twist. The book is highly reminiscent of Scott’s novels, full of Scotland, and concerns with nobility and morality, but Stevenson’s characters are more complex. The master himself possesses wicked charm and immense brio (temporarily even winning some affection from the dour narrator); Alison’s passion betrays her own best interests; and Henry, though the good man from the start, turns out only human as the constant pressure on his flawed virtue finally drives him into moral confusion and madness. All this serves an exciting story which from Scotland moves to colonial New York and finally, the wilds of the Adirondacks which the author knew well (as well as India, which he did not).
     The book maintains the old novelistic façade of a true story with supposed lengthy statements and relations from several of the characters as well as from our narrator, Mr. Mackellar. These have the effect of casting a slightly prismatic glow over the whole. Stevenson himself mentioned as a model not Scott but Frederick Marryat whose The Phantom Ship he had been reading. “Let us make a tale,” he recalled proposing to himself, “a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation; a story that shall have the same large features, and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you have been reading and admiring.”
     Whether one considers his method “summary” and “elliptical” or not, Stevenson was repeatedly capable of composing a ripping yarn. Some may think higher peaks exist on the fiction Parnassus, but few writers reach the heights Stevenson here achieved.
 

The Year of my Life (Oraga Hara) [Issa, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa]

     I confess to little sympathy for the haiku in English, but I relished both verses and prose in this little book, written in 1819, by the author who reinvigorated the form of which Basho was the recognized master. Kobayashi Issa, a lay Buddhist priest, wrote with a passion, often choosing “low” subjects such as insects. While his work struck some as unseemly in his own day, he is now regarded as one of the four great writers of haiku along with Basho, Buson, and Shiki.
     The little book defines its tone with its opening with story of the priest who greets the New Year with tears. The succeeding chapters relate autobiographical incidents along with odd stories and folklore yet all the prose aims toward accommodating the poet to the all-but-intolerable conditions of life.
     Issa compares what he calls the “thin thread of my life” to that of a tortured tree. In order to “get more experience writing haiku,” following the examples of Saigyo, Basho, and others, the poet sets out traveling with a beggar’s bag and bundle. He proceeds (in the haibun form, mixing prose and verse) to provide a curious succession of information which, while entertaining, supports this theme throughout.      In a pleasant mood, the poet and his friends seek to hear a strange “celestial music” of which they have heard. He speculates on the meaning of a children’s game involving killing frogs and recalls an earlier poet’s story of a frog who judged a poetry contest. A physician who kills coupling snakes finds he has brought impotence to his son who had “a huge mushroom-shaped thing between his legs.” Each topic is oddly entertaining while reinforcing a sense of the fragility and impenetrability of earthly life. Most powerfully, the pathetic story of the boy swept away by the stream in whose pockets were found flowers he was carrying to his parents, inspiring a moralizing passage which prepares the ground for death of the author’s beloved daughter later.
     The nineteenth century introducer rightly says that Issa’s verses “would tickle even Yama the great king of hell.”

Hymn to Pan

For a year and a half, I have been trying to complete a version of the grand Hymn to Hermes, but it is still only half done. Here is the smaller piece for Hermes’ son.
My comments on the figure of Pan unexpectedly expanded as I wrote. In fact my essay on him remains a work in progress, as Pan’s implications continue to offer revealing bypaths. The piece is still not unified, and perhaps will never be, but it has already grown large enough that I have decided to leave it to be posted in June.

Now tell, o muse, of Hermes’ dear son Pan,
who loves all noise, goat-footed and two-horned.
Through wooded fields he roams with dancing nymphs;
they tread on high to goatless crests of stone.
They call on Pan, the shepherd’s bright-haired god, 5
all wild and mussed. He rules each snowy peak,
and every mountain top and rocky height.
He dances back and forth through thickest brush.
Sometimes he’s drawn to gentle streams, at times
he wanders through the rocky crags and goes 10
to highest peaks from which he watches flocks.
Through great pale mountains he will often dash.
Passing rough-hewn crags, he kills his prey,
that sharp-eyed god. Then at evening he ceases his chase,
returns with reed pipe song so wild and free, 15
so sweet in melody that bird could sing
no finer, who in blossoming spring leaves
pours forth the sweetest and the saddest song.
with him then clear-singing mountain nymphs
who dance with agile feet by deep-dark springs 20
and sing while Echo keens from mountain height.
The god is here, then there, among the choirs.
He wears lynx pelt and dances fast and free,
exulting in his heart in sweetest song,
in gentle fields where crocus, hyacinth, 25
and grass all mix and grow and blossom sweet.
They sing of gods and of Olympos height,
especially of Hermes of good luck
of how he is the herald for the gods,
and how to Arcady of springs and flocks 30
he came. Mount Kyllene is his sacred spot.
Where, though a god, he tends rough-coated flocks
for moist desire came on him there and grew
to mix in love with fair-haired Dryops’ maid.
Good marriage there he made with mortal wife 35
who bore a son, a marvel from his birth,
with goat feet, horns, so loud with sweetest laugh!
The nurse sprang up, afraid, and left the child,
in fear at sight of his rough face and beard.
At once luck-bringing Hermes took him up, 40
and held him, feeling joy fill up his heart,
then quickly sped to the immortals’ seat.
The child, all wrapped in skins of mountain hares,
was set by Zeus and the other gods.
When Hermes showed his son to all of them, 45
they all rejoiced but Dionysos most.
They called him Pan because he pleased them all.
And so, rejoice, my king! May my song please!
I call you up to mind and others, too.

The Trials of Lady Ochikubo

Page references in parentheses are to the 1971 Doubleday Anchor paperback edition of the translation by Wilfred Whitehouse and Eizo Yanagisawa.
Bracketed numbers indicate footnotes.

      The aristocrats of Heian Japan cultivated aesthetic sensibility to a subtlety unparalleled in ancient Greece or Rome. [1] Not so very many hundred of years after Japan had acquired writing and then Buddhism from the Chinese, a remarkable efflorescence of literature occurred, one in which women took a leading role. [2] In The Tale of Lady Ochikubo (the Ochikubo Monogatari) the main character and her antagonist, the nasty stepmother, are both female as is her loyal attendant Akogi. The lady’s lover is such a gentleman that he assists her in her sewing. The other principal works of the era were also written by women. In the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon and the so-called Mother of Michitsuna’s Kagerō Nikki the modern reader can glimpse the extraordinarily sophisticated development of the era’s taste for beauty. Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, touted by some as the earliest novel [3] (and by Kenneth Rexroth as “what may well be the world’s greatest novel” [4]), is a monumental and incredibly elaborately refined exploration of karma, sexual love, and Buddhist mysticism. The Tale of Lady Ochikubo written slightly earlier during the last quarter of the tenth century CE, can hardly fail to suffer by comparison, though it has substantial virtues of its own. Within the context of the hyper-aesthetic Heian society, this anonymous work [5] conveyed the prevailing social and artistic values of the period, though it also expressed certain tensions within these received ideas, but with a realistic narrative, sometimes comic or improper. The simplest theme the story suggests is karma, but the working out of revenge is so fanciful as to seem more a huge game than a matter of the highest importance. No one seems particularly enlightened, though some are more attractive and more virtuous than others.
     People speak through poetry or allusions to older poetry which would be familiar to all those raised in courtly society. Even Hyōbu no Shōyu, mocked as “the White-faced Colt,” who defecates in his pants while trying to make love (93), is capable of composing lyrically encoded messages. A character’s intentions and integrity are discerned from poetry. (113)
     These nobles often speak in other indirect ways as well. It was impolite to address someone by a personal name. Generally titles are used, though other by-names are used as well. Not only do these often change in the course of the story, but, in addition, several characters sometimes occupy the same position and are thus called by the same name. Though one’s status and thus identity are contained in the title, apart from a few visits to court, one hears nothing of their work. They seem highly competitive, spending prodigious energies on intrigues centered around sex or power.
     Aesthetic cultivation is repeatedly evident. The author spares readers the inclusion of tedious and unnecessary detail. (148, 149-50, 193) At one point the author says that it would be “useless” to describe the grand celebrations for the old Chūnagon’s seventieth birthday and then proceeds to devote four pages to a single screen, though its scenes and verses have only the slightest relation to the narrative. (203) Precious reduplicative onomatopoetic expressions note the sound of tears falling (“tsubu, tsubu” 58), horse sounds (“hi hi”106), and intestinal rumbling (“koho, koho” and “hichi, hichi” 93). The Lady is so delicate that she finds it an exquisite torture when she is confined in a storeroom containing smelly sake, vinegar, and fish. (70) Such sensibility is tightly linked to wealth and status. Even religious objects, the rolls of sutras and other offerings, are described as luxury goods meant to impress in exactly the same way as clothing or carriages. [6]
     The identification of social standing, quite literally defined as proximity to the emperor, with good taste, artistic ability, and skills as a lover is linked as well to powerful codes that justify pride, even to the extent of high-handedness, in the well-born, and corresponding disgrace, shame, and clumsiness for those on lower ranks. [7] Thus the Third and Fourth Ladies are abashed upon learning that their half-sister has far surpassed them in wealth and exclaim “how ashamed our father and mother must be at the contrast.” (187) The Kata no Kita is “humiliated when her carriage of forced off the road and her room is taken from her (124, 128) and when the old Chūnagon learns what happened, he feels such “disgrace” that he ponders renouncing the world (156) just as Fourth Lady had done. (178) Even at the end of his life the old Chūnagon feels he will be in “disgrace” if he does not achieve another promotion before he dies, worrying “it would be said of me that I was predestined never to rise to high rank.” (209) Even the powerful Minister of the Left fears social opprobrium when he advises his son, “Do not invite the criticism of the public.” (156)
     In this context, so determined by social standing and concepts of shame and guilt, the theme of karma or of fate or destiny repeatedly recurs in the story, but it is always linked to these social and aesthetic values far more clearly than to moral or spiritual ones. Once she ascends above his station, the Lady’s father regrets mistreating her, but he consoles himself by reflecting that his behavior arose not from moral failing but “an unfortunate Fate.” He feels “ashamed” because the, now Taishō, for whom he had never done a favor, has elevated his social standing, while his own sons are thoughtless and negligent and “have done nothing but bring disgrace upon me.” (211)
     Still, the misdeeds of some characters are quite precisely balanced by the consequences they suffer, even if the instrument of retributive justice is the extraordinary Shōshō, who might seem an unlikely tool of Heaven, indulging in sentimental melancholy at first and noble magnanimity in the end, but displaying thoughtless light-heartedness as well as vindictiveness along the way. The entire vindication of the Lady is dependent on this individual, who is described as possessing almost superhuman beauty and ability as well as an unchallenged supremacy in the favor of the Mikado. Peculiarly qualified to right the Lady’s wrongs, he cannot be challenged and can rescue her from a lifetime in obscure servitude in her lower room.
     His schemes take years to accomplish, during all of which time she is kept in obscurity. Meanwhile the shame and distress she had experienced is transferred to her oppressors until all is set right in the end. The comb box the Kata no Kita had taken eventually finds its way back. The Lady’s offensive suitor Tenyaku no Kata is repaid by Shōyu the White-faced Colt, though the latter actually sleeps with the Fourth Lady and engenders a child.
     Though the book does portray realistic conditions and conversations and the action is, for the most part, plausible, the characters are more like simple counters in almost mathematical relationships than like fully rounded human beings. While perhaps too much is made of the story’s similarity to Cinderella, it does share the folk-take narrator’s unconcern for psychological subtlety. [8]
     The Lady herself is primarily an object of pathos as she accepts indignities and thankless labors without a cross word, only weeping in her solitude. The European reader will recall the popularity of the theme of a delicate lady pursued by an unworthy would-be seducer in a later era in which many women produced and read novels. It matters little whether the cad reforms (as in Richardson’s Pamela), or is replaced by his better (The History of Sir Charles Grandison), or even if the lady dies virtuous though violated (as in Clarissa). The better part of these narratives are spent in contemplating suffering beauty. Lady Ochikubo rarely exhibits any characteristic not implied by her general excellence in every way, undimmed by for the difficult conditions imposed upon her. She forgives her wicked stepmother (e.g. 67) and is, in general, passive throughout.
     Quite naturally her antagonist the Kita no Kata presents a mirror image. Wicked without motive, she is said on the very first page to be “peculiar.” Later her peculiarity is specified as “spite” (57, 222 and elsewhere), resulting in her being categorically “evil-minded.” (223) Unregenerate to the end (see 211, for example) she fumes, “I hated her so.” (178)
     Her husband is a weak and faded fellow from the start. The old Chūnagon is described as dotty from the start, “stupid” (178), his memory fading (131), and soon to die (147), but he is capable not only of failing to see how his daughter is mistreated, but of saying such things as “starve her to death” (68) and “I don’t even want to look at her.” (70) He is however amenable to reconciliation despite having been “in his dotage for many years.” (195)
     The Shōshō (later Minister of the Left), clearly the single heroic figure of the story, though invaluable to the heroine, might be questioned in several ways. He is lacking in filial piety toward the Lady’s family and his own. Though he is said to be “unforgiving” (81), he ultimately does forgive and make amends. At one point he tosses off a justification for his hostile actions on social grounds, saying he feels he had been treated with “intentional rudeness,” (180) but he later provides a fuller explanation, noting that, he had fallen in hopelessly and irreversibly in love with the Lady upon hearing her stepmother torment her. On the basis of this commitment he thereupon formulated the entire plan of revenge and subsequent munificence. (237) Thus romantic love, even an affair of which his mother does not fully approve, emerges as a preeminent value. [9] To Tachihaki his master’s power as a lover is legendary. “There has been nothing like his great love, neither in the present nor in olden times.” (42)
     Thus, while The Tale of Lady Ochikubo is a profoundly conservative work in that it accepts without question the extremely hierarchical system of the Heian aristocracy and virtually all the social apparatus that accompanied it, the novel nonetheless spotlights a hero motivated by erotic desire combined with utter faithfulness. This irregularity allows him to ignore his own mother and makes possible the Lady’s rise in status. Her harsh early life only served to magnify her virtue and make her more attractive to her lover. The passions are exalted in a feudal game of intrigue and acting and oblique poetic composition. The lover must be won by one’s good taste which, it seems, must accompany moral character, beauty, intelligence, and skill. By secret meeting and furtive glances, the affair progresses. The putative Buddhism of all the characters plays no role.
     Sophisticated and allusive, elitist and elegant as the book is, I suspect it also has some affinity with mass market romance novels. Arising as the monogatari did from oral storytelling on all levels of society, it would be surprising if it did not contain popular elements, but in this case, they are refined to a high level.



1. Of course the cultivated and opulent luxury of perhaps one-tenth of one percent of the population was possible only with the servitude of the rest of the population. The military, that is to say the samurai, later came to assume decisive power at the expense of the old aristocratic families.

2. To my knowledge, the closest parallels to the prominence of women writers during this era are in medieval Provence and archaic Greece.

3. For others The Tale of Ochikubo is the first, though such judgments can mean little as they are entirely determined by the critic’s definition of the genre. For the Japanese works to have priority one must exclude, for instance the five Greek romances, the Satyricon, Golden Ass, Dashakumaracharita and Kādambari in Sanskrit, etc. Quite often one finds a reference to Don Quixote as the first novel.

4. In “The World of Genji.”

5. In early times the book was attributed to the celebrated tenth century scholar Minamoto no Shitagau along with the Taketori Monogatari and the Utsobo Monogatari. Other suggestions have been made, but today most scholars regard the author as unknown. Curiously, several have ventured the opinion, on impressionistic stylistic ground, that the author must be male. This makes little sense. I like the suggestion of Whitehouse and Yanagisawa that it may have been someone resembling the character of the noble lady-in-waiting Akogi who, in the last line of the story, was said to have lived two hundred years.

6. See 196 for the sutras, and 194 for clothing and carriages. Clearly both are examples of conspicuous consumption.

7. The modern reader is apt to be shocked when the Tenyaku no Suke is beaten. One learns that he never really recovered and died. Within the book’s values, however, the Shōshō’s actions are beyond criticism due to his lofty position, while the Kata no Kita’s mistreatment of the Lady is totally blameworthy. Apart from this physical attack, in order to discomfit the Kata no Kita, he sees to it that the Fourth Lady has sex, and indeed becomes pregnant, with Hyōbu no Shōyu.

8. The step mother and, to a lesser degree the step-sisters are similar, and the trip to Ishiyama temple has something in common with the royal ball. Surely both stories play on sibling rivalry and a terrible mother archetype, but the Japanese story is fundamentally realistic. Its themes of social disgrace and hyper-aesthetic pastimes are absent in the European story.

9. Thus the genre of aristocratic romances (tsukuri-monogatari) came to be more popular than war stories (gunki-monogatari) or historical chronicles (rekishi-monogatari).
Those familiar with medieval European literature will note how ideals of courtly love spread through the courts and shaped the poetry in a similar way even to the concept of love at first sight.

Are Uncle Tom’s Children Bound by History?

Page references are to the 1965 paperback Harper Perennial edition.


     Uncle Tom’s Children is a remarkable first book, all the more for the fact that these insightful and artful stories were the work of an author who, due to American racism, had only an elementary school education. Apart from that severe limitation, Wright also spent his youth in his grandmother’s Seventh Day Adventist household in which worldly amusements such as non-scriptural reading were forbidden. Through heroic exertions of will, he managed to educate himself and write several of the most important works of the American twentieth century. He did receive aid in his development from the Communist Party that sponsored the John Reed Clubs and the Left Front literary journal that had given him critical support and recognition and from the cultural commitment of the New Deal whose WPA Writers Project had supported him.
     Wright had, of course, a troubled relationship with the Party, having left Chicago partly to escape the political scene that had allowed him to emerge as a writer. Though he later resigned his membership and contributed to the anti-communist The God that Failed in 1949, he remained a principled leftist. He avoided, for instance, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, correctly suspecting its roots in the CIA.
     Critics who comment on Wright’s political evolution often say explicitly that his motive for leaving the Party was his refusal to write agit-prop with plots guided by vulgar notions of revolutionary art. Indeed, in spite of the unsparing, precise, and detailed picture of American racism he details, he never succeeded in integrating his social view with his artistic practice, and most of his fiction is ultimately more psychological and philosophical than political.
     In fact his theoretical call to arms, “The Blueprint for Black Writers,” criticizes not reactionary literature but rather phony literature, either the museum-like preservation of folk culture or the second-rate imitation of mainstream writers. He devastatingly quotes Lenin to the effect that the petty bourgeois in their attempt to emulate the rich often succeed only in caricature. Reference to Lenin may seem doctrinaire, yet what he was insisting upon was the presentation of the truth of his own experience, neither more nor less than, say, Hemingway might have done.
     Even the essay “I Tried to be a Communist” [1], his apologia for leaving the Party, has no mention of any conflicts over literary principles, no critique of Marxist ideology, or even of the Party’s shifting views of a correct line – his criticism of the Party is virtually entirely about the jockeying for power of individuals, each so bizarre and groundless in their accusations that an escaped mental patient claiming higher party standing can command authority. The jealousy, backstabbing, and cynical manipulation in pursuit of power he describes in the CPUSA, far from peculiar to that group, are familiar to workers in many educational institutions and corporate offices.
     He describes the first conflict in the Chicago group as between the clique of painters who held the leadership and that of writers who challenged them. [2] In the shadow cast by Stalin’s purges, his friend Ross is accused of betraying the movement He mentions the publication of “Big Boy Leaves Home” without a word about any criticism of his writing. Apart from this unjust condemnation, his other major policy conflict is over the dissolution of the John Reed Clubs which he presents as an example of the Party’s top-down management in which members were expected to support any decision from above without discussion or dissent. Serious though it is, this criticism of the Communist Party has nothing to do with censorship or nonartistic influence on his own work. Indeed he more than once reports praise for his writing by Party members.
     This book, along with Native Son and Black Boy, are the most accurate and highly charged accounts of incidents in the latter part of the hundred years of terror in the South that followed the withdrawal of federal troops as part of the corrupt election deal allowing Hayes to take the presidency in 1877, called the Great Compromise by some and the Great Betrayal by others. Though none of the picture Wright paints contradicts Marxist analysis, little of what he implies requires it either. Wright clearly seeks to set down the terms of his own profound experience of Jim Crow.
     Apart from Wright’s expert use of dialect [3], he is notable for foregrounding the psychological concomitants of racism, including its strong sexual element. [4] Significantly less evident in the two stories in which Communists play a role, sexual motives are prominent in all the others. In the autobiographical piece “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” Wright relates the case of a man who was castrated for having sex with a white prostitute. In “Big Boy Leaves Home” the crisis of transgression is dramatically intensified by the fact that the white women saw naked black bodies. Action arises from a rape in “Long Black Song.” In “Down by the Riverside” Mann’s questioners suspect him of improprieties with Mrs. Heartfield.
     Apart from the neuroses of the oppressor, Wright is equally eloquent on the consequences for the oppressed. In his own version Wright restates DuBois’ classic formulation of double consciousness: “Here I learned to lie, , to steal, to dissemble. I learned to play that dual role which every Negro must play if he wants to eat and live.” (13) Silas of “Long Black Song” rages “Ah’m gonna be hard! When they come fer me Ah’m gonna be here!” while next lamenting “But, Lawd, Ah don wanna be this way!” (152-3) In “Fire and Cloud” Rev. Taylor retreats into a dissociative state. “When Taylor spoke he seemed to be outside of himself, listening to his own words, aghast and fearful.” (185) Mann has “wild impulse” to shoot blindly. (120)
     Yet the greatness of Wright’s vision utterly transcends these historically bound themes. Wright found in France both an escape from the American racial atmosphere and the congenial philosophy of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus (who were all like him intellectuals of the left), but the existentialist moments are already present in his work long before The Outsider and The Long Dream. Silas’ monologue, cited above, continues “It don mean nothing! Yuh die ef yuh fight! Yuh die ef yuh doin fight. Either way yuh die n it don mean nothing . . .” (153) To him “It don make no difference which way Ah go.” (152) When Mann inadvertently kills, it reminds the reader of nothing so much as Meursault’s murder in The Stranger.
     Wright’s rural Southern characters have much in common with Sartre’s man of good faith [5] who strives for the impossible and can experience freedom only with angoisse. They resemble Camus’ man of action who defies human limitation by breaking the paralysis of helplessness: Silas in his desperation sounds rather like Camus when he wrote “all I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice.” [6] Far from being shaped by Negrophiles in France, Wright’s later, more explicitly existential books were a natural growth from his earlier work.
     In the concluding lines of “Bright and Morning Star” which ends Uncle Tom’s Children, Sue dies by violence, but remains defiant to the end and finds this lethal assault “forced her to live again, intensely.” (263) In her strength of will she finds her affirmation, her “morning star,” neither in the promises of her church nor in the promise of revolution. Communist organizing provided the terms of her rebellion in the time and place in which she finds herself in history, but her psychology is not dependent on the specific conditions of her life. In the same way Wright’s vision included but was not limited by a sensitive and informed response to social conditions of his time.



1. Originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1944 and later reprinted in the hugely successful The God that Failed edited by the anti-communist British Labourite Richard Crossman.

2. It is surely noteworthy that both these contending groups were artists. Though Wright had been introduced to the Communists through his fellow workers in the post office, one finds no mention of them or of stockyard or steel workers in the accounts of leadership.

3. His unimpeachable bona fides as a proletarian was challenged by fellow Communists because, though self-educated, he spoke in an educated and genteel manner.

4. See Advertisements for Myself for an account of the piece Norman Mailer had written for Lyle Stuart’s The Independent which asked, “Can’t we have some honesty about what’s going o in the South? Everybody who knows the South knows that the white man fears the sexual potency of the Negro,” provoking Faulkner to attack his masculinity. Eleanor Roosevelt may have been doing the same thing when she reacted to the statement by calling him “horrible.” Few white writers equaled Mailer’s insight when he wrote in “The White Negro,” “Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk.”

5. See Being and Nothingness, Washington Square Press edition, 1977, p. 724..

6. Albert Camus, “Neither Victims nor Executioners.”

Cookbooks

This is not placed among critical writings because, as I note below, cookbooks, like other technical manuals, are not primarily literary texts. My intention is to define a profile, a personality from the data presented, just as we sometimes do when browsing the shelves of a new friend. In this it resembles my piece titled “A Library’s Commonplaces and Curiosities” posted for May 2011. Perhaps these both belong among memoirs.


     Food is surely one of the chief pleasures of life. On my list of five, food scrambles against the four others that first occur to me for the pride of second place. Though cookbooks [1] are, in general, non-literary, as their primary goal is not beauty in themselves, but rather the product of food on the table, each has individual stylistic characteristics and some possess considerable charm whether the reader ever brings them to the kitchen counter. Over a lifetime of consulting cookbooks, cooking, and eating, a considerable shelf of volumes that have never seen my library has accumulated in my kitchen. Each represents a particular vision of food; each has its own style, and many have charm. As a whole, the collection resembles without duplicating the patterns of my diet. In the present time, when seeking a desired recipe in isolation on the internet, printing a copy and discarding it after use has become the dominant mode of research for the practical cook, the shelves of books have acquired the additional appeal of endangered artifacts.
     Though some of my cookbooks have the graces of style, wit, or originality, and others command interest due to age, exoticism, or the circumstances of their coming to me, all are fully functional. And their value is the more powerful for my generation which grew up with such an exceedingly restricted palate. In her often acerbic 1832 account of her travels, Frances Trollope had conceded that in America “The bread is every where excellent.” [2] Yet my own cohort, born shortly after World War II, felt Henry Miller knew what he was talking about when he wrote, “You can travel for fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.” And I am far from alone in having taken his advice: “Begin today by baking your own bread.” [3]
     In this era of Trader Joe’s in the strip mall and organics in the Shop-Rite, it is difficult to imagine how narrow the American food world was a generation or two ago. Living in the suburbs of a great American city, I never tasted pizza before my middle school years. Indeed, I never saw a fresh head of garlic until after college, though now I use it almost every day. I have read that broccoli, now common enough to be the butt of jokes, was all but unknown until after World War II, while today even a supermarket in a boring suburb will offer eight different Caribbean tubers.
     During this era, even for the diet of babies, formula outpaced breast-feeding. Its very artificiality seemed to many a recommendation. My father-in-law considered margarine a scientific advance, more modern and thus preferable to butter. As a child I consumed prodigious quantities of powdered milk, but I believe economy, not modernity, was the value in this case. Instant coffee held prestige it now has lost except in remote corners of the globe where, like Spam in Asia, it yet retains a sheen of luxury altogether absent in the American home. We can only be grateful that the susceptible homemaker did not undergo a vogue for powdered eggs during the fifties. It was the age of imaginative gelatin presentations and many casseroles, often compounded with the use of a can of soup and topped with the use of dry onion soup mix. Monosodium glutamate, seasoning salt, and coarse grind black pepper were the principal seasonings favored by connoisseurs.
     Admittedly, the US had not yet entered the nadir of their food experience which was to arrive only with the proliferation of fast food chains which replaced the great variety of short order places, many with engaging atmosphere even if they offered indifferent food. Now, of course, any place in the land the McDonald’s customer can pass from hungry to overfull without any actual sensation of eating at all. Those wishing to go beyond A Hundred Recipes for Hamburger during the 1950s might have come upon the works of James Beard, who catered to unfailingly hearty, middlebrow, mainstream (apparently masculine) tastes to remain on best-seller lists with only a gesture now and then toward the French cooking he fondly remembered from his youth.
     Even as a suburban child I sought out food experiences beyond the Betty Crocker Cookbook. I began with a leaning toward rebellion that led me to eschew beefsteak simply because it was such an icon, particularly for men, and I had in addition inherent tendencies toward both the gourmet and the gourmand. Welcoming to tastes like Limburger and all the varieties of the piquant, I would order duck blood soup at the Warsawianka and squid at the old Diana’s in Chicago once I was in high school and able to visit these places on my own. Had I ever seen the inside of a French restaurant, I would have made mine sweetbreads even if I hadn’t known what they were. Though aware it was a sin, I relished sheer quantity of food as well. As a child I confess I raided the freezer for ice cream at all hours and repeatedly made myself nearly sick with potato chips. (This is a genuine confession because none of this has changed, though potato chips have been replaced by good bread. Throughout my life I have retained the ability to consume virtually any quantity of popcorn.)
     I am today sufficiently experienced in the kitchen that I would feel confident putting together a meal from any pantry with no cookbook. I could make bread, cookies, and galettes de sarrasin without as much as a measuring cup. Yet at the time that I finished college, I had virtually no experience as a cook. Patricia and I cooked from two Chinese cookbooks which, though neither was particularly well-executed or even complete, did provide a basis for simultaneously exotic and inexpensive eating. For when I began experimenting in the kitchen, I was committed to voluntary poverty and driven primarily by a search for the very cheapest sustenance. Patricia and I pioneered the many uses of canned mackerel. We began to seek out recipes that were at once inexpensive and exotic. The fact is, of course, that costly ingredients such as sea bass or Porterhouse steak often invite only the simplest preparation while inexpensive cuts of meat and vegetarian meals often require substantial preparation. Research into cookbooks began.
     As a scholar, I would be likely to begin with the so-called Apicius, whose work, sometimes called De Re Coquinaria, is a real cookbook with enough detail to use today, but it is no more than functional, launching right into recipes without a preliminary word. For reading I pick up Athenaeus, where discussions of foodstuffs wander for pages, mixing with all sorts of other civilized discourse. Chapters cover fish, vegetables, and wine, but also perfumes, “worthless philosophers,” “love of boys,” and virtually everything else under the sun. Here, just as in lived experience, the social context of dining sometimes gains prominence over the culinary aspects. It is not a bad notion of paradise, this imaginary congregation of the learned, enjoying their food and drink and each other’s clever and erudite discourse. But I drift -- neither the Latin nor Greek has been a source for my own table.
     I have only occasionally used Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cookbook which was published in 1896, though my copy dates from 1930 and is supplemented by someone’s handwritten additions, most of them Italian dishes. It includes as well no less than thirty pages of advertisements, including one for Foss’ Vanilla which the reader learns received a medal from the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association and another for a carpet cleaning service that offers moth prevention.
The Boston Cooking School (whose own ad touts their classes “for men and women from sixteen to sixty”) and Farmer’s book mark the era of the origins of the home economics movement and a more scientific vision of cooking. She opens with definitions and statistics: “FOOD is anything which nourishes the body. Thirteen elements enter into the composition of the body: oxygen, 62 1/2%; carbon, 21 1/2%; hydrogen, 10%; nitrogen, 3%; calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, chlorine, sodium, magnesium, iron, and fluorine the remaining 3%.” The reader may wonder what purpose is served from learning the chemical formulae given for starch and sugar, but it must have seemed quite enlightened and modern, even as it suggested a challenging midterm examination more than an inviting spread.
     During my life I have most commonly joined my fellow-countrymen in using America’s most popular cookbook, Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking. Four versions now occupy my shelves – one from 1936 was my mother’s, a 1968 version has been with me since my marriage and two are subsequent revisions. These are not merely archival. Corn dodgers and thumbprint cookies, among other recipes, have lost their place in newer editions and I must seek out the volume in which they can be found. The book’s excellence is somewhat mysterious. Rombauer was far from a professional cook or author. Her own tastes were very Midwestern and middle-of-the-road. Yet she produced a work as comprehensive as could be while maintaining a beguiling if intermittent presence behind the recipes with her wit and anecdotes. Though cookbooks had existed for several hundred years, and Miss Farmer’s had attained impressive sales, most housewives worked without such resources. The Boston School taught cooks as well as matrons, while the Joy of Cooking was resolutely for non-professional domestic use, with a view toward combining general practicality with gracious entertaining.
     The author was herself a consumer and the book almost accidental. In 1931 when the author was in her early fifties after the suicide of Mr. Rombauer and the collapse of the family’s fortunes, she collected recipes from personal acquaintances and self-published the volume at a local label printer. Rombauer’s clever comments and digressions, what her original subtitle called “culinary chat,” became fewer with every edition, but the content became considerably more cosmopolitan. Today it includes negi maki, kamut, and pâté maison, but not scalloped potatoes.
     Her first commercial edition had a dust-jacket by her daughter Marion (later to assume the duties of revision) depicting St. Martha of Bethany, the one who was “cumbered about much serving” when Christ came calling and Mary sat at Jesus’ feet. On the cookbook cover Martha defeats a dragon, though I am unsure whether the monster represents kitchen drudgery or a messily turned omelet. (Martha is considered by some the patron saint of cooking and with better title to my mind than St. Lawrence whose rights are supported by his comment while being martyred on a gridiron: “Turn me over. I am done on this side.”)
     Though the moralistic Sylvester Graham’s whole-grain bread recipe first appeared in The New Hydropathic Cookbook in 1855 and his followers, the Kelloggs, began making their breakfast cereals only fifty years later, [4] little in an American supermarket could have been called “health food.” Even the stores dedicated to such products seemed to deal mainly in overpriced vitamin supplements for the hypochondriac and the infirm and protein powders for body-builders. It would be years before Chez Panisse demonstrated that organic and healthy ingredients could be compounded into America’s most elegant meals. Yoghurt was completely unavailable most places; until the seventies we used to order yoghurt starter and stone ground whole wheat flour by mail.
     As time went on, though health food became a recognized niche and then mainstream, and we did accumulate some books that linger on my shelves. The earliest stratum includes a little hardcover copy of Edna Thompson’s Yoga Cookbook (from Dagobert Runes’ redoubtable Philosophical Library, 1959), an international miscellany. A mass market of sorts had developed by the time The Yogi Cook Book appeared in 1968. Attributed to Yogi Vithaldas (who had taught Yehudi Menuhin) and Susan Roberts, this is primarily a primer on Indian cooking. I retain also Diet for a Small Planet, by the astute food policy analyst Francis Moore Lappé, the Deaf Smith book (sugarless and vegan), and several of Molly Katzen’s volumes. Though I saw it in the homes of many friends for years, I never possessed the book featuring the “macrobiotic” regime of George Ohsawa, who predicted the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy due to their sanpaku eyes. Brown rice and vegetables, though, was the fall-back dish in the late sixties.
     Though I regularly produce whole wheat loaves with added flaxseed meal, oatmeal, and whole wheatberries, my goal in bread-baking has regularly been a French-style loaf. My mother, a farm girl, baked bread at home even while working, and I myself have long taken Miller’s advice to make bread at home. Over time, I have tried countless varieties, including maintaining sourdoughs for as much as a few years at a stretch. [5] Since youth I have used the unimaginative A World of Breads by Dolores Casella, though my favorite recipe from it is not a risen bread but fetayer, the Near Eastern whole wheat turnover stuffed with greens and pine nuts. I recently found in Daniel Leader’s Bread Alone a highly successful method for beginning a sourdough.
     In this country, of course, France had been accustomed to pride of place among national cuisines. I have long relished the telling anecdotes and odd data available in Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste (1825), and my belief remains strong in his signature apothegm “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” but he expected someone to cook for him, and his book has no recipes. His “gastronomical meditations,” however, are unique in the blend of high spirits and utter seriousness with which he approaches the table. His associative essays are not unworthy successors to Montaigne’s. In the piece on fish (chapter VI, section 6) he begins with speculations on the origin of humanity from the sea, then proceeds to an anecdote about Vadius Pollio who fed his slaves to his eels. A few paragraphs later he is calculating the weight of a gross of oysters, a quantity he says was commonly eaten as an appetizer. This introduces his reminiscence of a gentleman who ate nearly four hundred as a prelude to dining. After passing through ancient fish sauces and a number of other topics, he relates the tale of a Turkish sultan who tested the sexual self-control of some dervishes who accepted the rich meat diet he provided while refusing the available “odalisques.” After some time on an equally luxurious diet of fish, however, “the too happy cenobites succumbed . . . most marvelously.” Yet he caps even this amusing story by calling fish “an endless source of meditation and surprise” and reflecting that the flood in Genesis, while a “cataclysm” to the human population must have been “a time of rejoicing, conquest, and festivity for the fishes.” Surely the French jurist would have been welcome at Athenaeus’ table; I know he would be at mine.
     Some of the same rambling may be observed in Alan and Jane Davidson’s abridged translation of the Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine (1873) by Dumas père in spite of the book’s dictionary format. Dumas does provide basic definitions and description, but he often goes on into anecdotes and curiosities. One would hardly guess that the article on onions, for instance, contains an account of a fist-fight between a partisan of French onions against one for the English. Under madeleines one finds not only an recipe but an narrative of a traveler in need of shelter and sustenance who knocked at an isolated country door late at night only to encounter a wild man, naked to the waist, his face smeared with flour who spoke with a “sepulchral” voice. In spite of reservations he enetered and eventually was fed most satisfyingly with madeleines and Bordeaux of the first quality.”
     I do have an American version of Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire, but it is primarily a reference book for the haute cuisine hotel menus of over a hundred years ago. It allows the cook to appreciate even more the role of Julia Child in domesticating French food without compromising it. And, of course, I have her two-volume Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) as well as three or four of her later works. I have yet to follow one of her recipes with care and to find the end product wanting. Yet her broader cultural influence – she was the opening wedge for good eating in general and “foreign” foods in particular – surely arose from her television series. Cooking instruction may seem unsuited to television unless viewers are taking notes, but her persona found greater expressive scope on WGBH than on the printed page, and her influence has been wholly beneficial.
     Elizabeth David’s writing is sufficiently polished for the reader to believe in her judgments. Her recipes, which are often presented is a charmingly casual fashion, rarely fail. She is as good with traditional British dishes as with French and Mediterranean. Though when young she had been presented at court as a debutante, her life turned out to be thoroughly Bohemian, and consistently devoted to exploring the pleasures of the table.
     We soon learned that peasant cooks throughout the world had shared our interest in inexpensive ingredients. We discovered how Indian spices can make a tasty meal of anything whatever. In my tattered old Penguin edition of Dharamjit Singh’s Indian Cookery nearly every recipe has a dozen “aromatics.” (Later the actress Madhur Jaffrey produced a number of successful cookbooks, though these are impossibly assimilationist in my opinion.)
     My fondness for Fes vu par sa cuisine by the redoubtable Zette Guinaudeau is surely magnified by my partiality for Morocco and for Fes in particular, but the book has much to recommend it even to those who prefer to stay at home and eschew Maghrebi dishes. Mme. Guinaudeau was a pioneer with excellent taste who resided in Fes for over thirty years. Her appreciation for the subtleties of Fassi cooking is of a piece with her skills as a sketcher of scenes of daily life. And, like Alice Toklas, she includes a recipe for majoun, that “mélange fait de drogues et dépices, de hachich et de miel.” My copy is a fascinating object itself, a 1966 reprint by J. E. Laurent of Oudaia and Rabat of their 1958 first edition. An English translation by J. E. Harris was published in 1964 with the title Traditional Moroccan Cooking: Recipes from Fez. I regret that I have not seen her more comprehensive Les Secrets des Cuisine en Terre Marocaine which I understand includes this earlier book.
     For Mexican recipes we relied for years on Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz’ The Complete Book of Mexican Cooking. At some point, in a Salvation Army most likely, I picked up a 1955 copy of Josefina Velazquez de Leon’s Mexican Cook Book Devoted to American Homes, which, despite its title was printed in Mexico City. Untrained except by her mother, Velazquez de Leon came to occupy a central place in the recognition of Mexican cooking. A widow whose family’s wealth was lost in the 1910 revolution, she operated a cooking school, founded her own publishing company to put out her book and a long list of others, many with a regional focus. Her volume, directed toward Americans, unfortunately, suffers from the same defect as Ortiz’ – an overemphasis on the corn kitchen much of which might be regarded as antojitos, neglecting the rich variety of other sorts of dishes. I have only consulted from the library the best resource for those curious about other aspects of Mexican food -- Diana Kennedy’s books, The Cuisines of Mexico, The Art of Mexican Cooking, and others. Kennedy brings real delighted appreciation to the broadest range of dishes, though her recipes are sometimes more informative than functional, for instance, when she writes about the kitchen uses of ant eggs. Her emphasis on the offbeat and the wholly authentic is a useful corrective, though, and provides many recipes unavailable elsewhere. (Why is it that the narrow scope of most Mexican cookbooks is even more pronounced in Mexican restaurants? There are so very few presenting regional cuisine or even main dishes without tortillas beyond huevos rancheros and a few treatments of beefsteak.)
     Among my other surveys of national cuisine I count Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food (especially good for use legumes and grains in main dishes), Fiona Dunlop’s Medina Kitchen with its excellent pictures, Food from the Arab World by Marie Khayat and Margaret Chase Keating (published, oddly, in Italy), a delightfully old-fashioned Hungarian Cookery Book by Károly Gundel, The Complete Greek Cookbook by Teresa Yanilos, The Spanish Cookbook by Barbara Norman, Joza Břízová's Czechoslovakian Cookbook (one of an admirable series that translates for English-speakers a wide variety of popular cookbooks), Gretel Beer’s Austrian Cooking and Baking, Monica Bayley’s Black Africa Cook Book, Sky Juice and Flying Fish: Traditional Caribbean Cooking by Jessica B. Harris (source of “blessed bullas,” a most satisfying bread-like cookie), At Home with Japanese Cooking by Elizabeth Andoh , New Cantonese Cooking by Yin-Fei Lo, Susan Anderson’s Indonesian Flavors, and Jenny Grossinger’s Jewish Cooking for unpretentious Ashkenazi dishes.
     And then we have as well a collection of single recipes, some handwritten, most on clippings from newspapers and magazine, food coop and daycare newsletters, more and more of course from the internet. Oyster-shucking instructions I have never successfully followed, Jamaican jerk, Chinese moon cakes, cannabis cookies, marrons glacés, the Story of Pecans, natural remedies from the Emma Goldman Clinic, lots of sourdough, carrot ginger soup, How to Make Yoghurt at Home, Sprout Your Own Beans, my mother’s shipwreck stew and kolaches and what she called Mrs. O’Donoghue’s bread, fried sage leaves, cantaloupe ice, sorrel punch, and Ethiopian spice tea.
     A meal is like a book in that it embodies a vision. The cooking patterns of an individual are an oeuvre, a body of work that cannot avoid significant patterns. Further, the kitchen usages of a country or a region relay a sense of place, an identity, more effectively than photographs. Through cookbooks the cook may in a sense recreate a culture with immediacy. Varying values emerge not only through religious, aesthetic, and intellectual systems, but also through a prediction for wheat, rice, or cassava, for steaming or sautéing, for rose water, capsicum, tarragon, or the mysterious asafetida. Reading a novel, one consistently measures the author’s vision against one’s own lived experience, but the user of a cookbook can add to the enriching pleasure of temporarily inhabiting the consciousness of another the substantial benefit of a meal on the table, new in some way to one’s palate, with its own rewards. These may be more modest but they are surely also more dependable that those available from volumes of more metaphysical inclination.



1. Cookbook and cook book are both used by equally careful writers. Cook-book or cookery book sound out-of-date or British to Americans.

2. In Domestic Manners of the Americans. She adds, “They rarely enjoy it themselves, as they insist on eating horrible half-baked hot rolls, both morning and evening” which leaves the reader wondering both whether she was speaking of biscuits and, more mysterious, who ate the excellent bread. Mrs. Trollope was certainly not shy about ridiculing Americans, but, then, perhaps, as an Englishwoman, she was not really familiar with good bread.

3. Miller’s comments are from “The Staff of Life” in Remember to Remember.

4. It may seem ironic that American breakfast cereal began as a health food promoted by men who wished to promote a diet that would most effectively suppress sexuality. Since T. Coraghessan Boyle's 1993 comic novel The Road to Wellville and the subsequent movie, their practices, including the use of machines of their own invention which rapidly administered enemas of water and then of yoghurt.
The term “health food” dates only from the twenties.

5. In California I was once given one that was said to date from Gold Rush days. The responsibility of such a legacy kept me going on that one a year and a half. Its antiquity was doubtless a fable, and in my hands it eventually succumbed to neglect.

The Red Rooster

Texts of the songs discussed follow the essay.

     Willie Dixon’s song “The Red Rooster,” particularly in Howlin’ Wolf’s version, is a classic blues. Resting on a rich foundation of earlier lyrics, the song is minimal, underdetermined, almost purely allusive, yet its power was sufficient to propel a number of versions to hit status, including covers by Big Mama Thornton, Sam Cooke, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, and many others.
     The song relates only the most limited information about the rooster, all in the past tense: he was too lazy to crow; nonetheless, he kept the barnyard either productively humming along or “upset in every way.” (Transcriptions and/or performances differ.) His roaming causes dogs to bark. This enigmatic description seems unintelligible, yet the tune has been a hit for a goodly list of artists. The underlying tradition reinforced by extra-textual performance elements constitutes a powerful and eloquent statement of erotic energy and ambivalence.
     Old country blues used farmyard imagery with archaic roots, which sometimes persisted in the later amplified music. The broadest stratum underlying the rooster figure is a simple association with fertility and sexuality. Since at least the seventeenth century (perhaps much earlier) the word cock has denoted the male sexual organ. [1] Combined with the rooster’s (conventionally masculine) self-assertion amounting at times to pugnacity, this pure sexuality renders the bird an efficient embodiment of masculine bragging. These characteristics have made the animal a national symbol for Portugal and France as well as a powerful image in Dixon’s song.
     From the unashamed boasting in heroic poetry through the erotic gab of medieval France [2] to the general assertion by the hip-hop duo Outkast in "Wailin’" “I use my gift of gab to boast and brag in every line,” ego assertion has frequently been prominent in poetry. Simply claiming the time of the audience or reader is egoistic for every artist. In racist America, when other forms of self-aggrandizement may have eluded many African-Americans, power as a lover remained always available.
     Chaucer’s Chantecleer made do with seven wives, but many poultry farmers suggest a ratio of twelve to fifteen hens for every rooster, giving the rooster a harem that might constitute an extravagant fantasy for a human. In “The Red Rooster” the primal power of the male is said to be required to return peace to the barnyard. The hounds cry out like Nature itself in misery during his absence.
     In the oldest parallel song, Charley Patton’s “Banty Rooster Blues (1929), the semiotic field associated with the rooster in American blues is established. The rooster is here defined as vigilant, enjoying power over women and the ensuing access to sexual pleasure without making himself vulnerable. The formulation would be shocking were it not shot through with self-reflective doubt and satire.
     The details are worth exploring as this text is fundamental to the imagery’s later development. The rooster is, first of all, vigilant. Just as he watches over his hens from a high vantage point and warns of approaching danger, he can do the same for the singer. But ambiguities have already proliferated, concealed by this simple description of a common animal’s behavior. The rooster is posted to the “backdoor,” though the front would be the ordinary approach for a stranger. Just as Dixon sang of the Little Red Rooster, Patton specifies a bantam bird, known for combativeness, sometimes considered comic for its belligerence combined with small stature. The size is a clue to the singer’s undercutting irony.
     The man of empty words is then compared to a rooster who does not crow. The singer may be bragging of his superiority to such men. In performing on stage, he is certainly crowing. Still, the persona’s identification with the rooster suggests that he may, at times at least, be unable to deliver on his proud promises.
     The next verse turns to the female, comparing a woman who will not do what he, the speaker, says to a hen who does not cackle when she lays. Though this line may not represent a functional agricultural value, the point is clear. The woman is to obey the man. The singer’s point is underscored as the line “What you want with a man, when he won't do nothin’ he say?” is succeeded by “What you want with a woman, when she won’t do nothin’ I say?”
     The will to power is so apparent as to be slightly ridiculous. In return for this absolute loyalty he offers nothing whatever, no support or commitment. She can expect to be left with nothing to show for her affair but his portrait on the wall, and inquiries about her vanished lover.
     For the moment, however, they can enjoy each other. Sexual contact is here expressed in fishing imagery. Patton’s line seems to be original, but the general area is marked by such classics as Henry Thomas’ exceedingly sophisticated and witty “Fishing Blues” (1928) which expresses through the imagery of angling a delicate complaint to an adulterous man: “I bet your life, your lovin' wife,/ Can catch more fish than you.” In Robert Petway’s “Catfish Blues” (1941) the singer imagines himself a catfish with his choice of women’s hooks on which to experience his Liebestod. In Patton’s song the fisherman expects a catch due to “the help I got.” This surely seems more to refer to his sexual equipment, analogous to the “hook in the water,” and the “cork on top,” rather than to his aide, the banty, long forgotten in the first stanza. Just as Thomas had assured his interlocutor that “any fish bite, you've got good bait” and Petway never doubted that the ladies would be after him, Patton’s appeal is to nature. How can a natural man fail?
     The song concludes with the lover associated with a faithful dog. He knows the dog’s bark, and he recognizes the woman during sexual activity in the dark. Patton has provided the key element in the rooster’s semiotic field only in the last stanza: the promise of ample sexuality, as available as one’s faithful hound.
     Succeeding versions added little to the meanings clustered around the rooster theme in the blues. Memphis Minnie’s song “If you see my rooster (please drive him home)” (1936) provides the hen’s perspective in a lament for the wandering rooster. His absence has led to an Arthurian wasteland (no eggs) that can only be resolved through the return of the heroic cock. Margie Day’s 1950 jump version of “Little Red Rooster” adds a more possessive hen’s advice: “clip his wings.” [4]
     These earlier songs formed the necessary context in which Willie Dixon’s belated electrified rendition can have meaning. Nearly all Dixon’s lines are derived from antecedent songs, yet his presentation is so elliptical as to puzzle the uninitiated. The rooster is a male ego preening, strutting, and signifying, searching to reconcile his wandering ways with his pursuit of love. The first four lines of Howlin’ Wolf’s recording of Dixon’s song employ Charley Patton’s conceit, but with a new trope. Whereas for Patton the lazy rooster is a negative example of a big talker with no action, he becomes for Dixon a pasha-like bird, enjoying his mastery of his domain. The curiously opposed and alternate hearings of Dixon’s line six balance so nicely that it matters little whether the barnyard is “stirred up” or quietly moving along.
     The wailing dogs of Dixon’s next verses likewise derive from Patton’s imagery. In the older song the dog’s bark is associated with the familiar body of the beloved, while in Dixon’s lyric that meaning is turned inside out. For Dixon the dogs are the clue in sound to the rooster’s having left his barnyard domesticity to go “on the prowl.” Their howling is a haunting indeterminate symbol, ominous and potent, still inhabited by traces of the earlier lines. As a soundtrack the dogs express the exciting but dangerous sense of the rooster “on the make.” The final stanza only reemphasizes this drive to reestablish peace using Memphis Minnie’s motif, asking that the rooster be driven home in the general cause of the household’s serenity.
     Willie Dixon drew on the earlier popular and folk material as well as the lived experience of a generation recently come to Chicago from Southern farms. Much of his original audience had first-hand experience of the proprietary behavior of roosters toward both females and territory. They appreciated the parallel with human actions, both those which might appear strong, heroic, and protective, and those which might seem laughable. His song is truly intertextual in that it can hardly be understood without reference to the composer’s sources and influences. Its lasting popularity



1. This association has led to the American preference of the word rooster. Related terms for penis include bird, surviving only in the expression “flipping the bird,” pecker, oiseau (or zizi) in French, uccelo in Italian, and countless others. The male chicken meaning of cock was in English reinforced by the “upward tilt” meaning. Oddly, through the adoption of a seventeenth century British usage of cock as a sort of passive obscene verb – “to want cocking, ” “I mean to get cocked.” – the word came to signify the female organ in Afro-American usage.
     The bird is conflated with the human face and with the male organ in the priapus gallinaceus in which the erect penis is the nose/beak and the balls are the wattles/cheeks. One of these in the Vatican museum is labeled “savior of the world”). Lorrayne Y. Baird’s “Priapus Gallinaceus: The Role of the Cock in Fertility and Eroticism in Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Studies in Iconography, vols. 7-8, University of Kentucky, 1981-82, pp. 81-111, provides a fascinating survey.
     On the other hand Marija Gimbutas documents the widespread cult of bird-headed goddesses in the Neolithic era. See her The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. Other animals might be used to similar effect, cf. for instance Slim Harpo’s “King Bee,” or the many songs using snakes and catfish.

2. The "Gab" as a Latent Genre in Medieval French Literature: Drinking and Boasting in the Middle Ages by John L. Grigsby.

4. Written by Edward and James Griffin and performed by Margie Day and the Griffin Brothers. Other related songs include Taj Mahal’s “Little Red Hen Blue”: “Well the little red hen said to the little red rooster/ Why don't you come 'round here like you used to?” and the anonymous humorous version.

“Oh mister Rooster!” said the little red hen,
“I haven't felt this way, since a god knows when...
but a big gruff voice said this ain't no Rooster.
And the little red hen knew the gander had goosed her.


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”


The Red Rooster/Little Red Rooster by Dixon, performed by Howlin’ Wolf, Big Mama Thornton, performed later by Sam Cooke (with Ray Charles), the Doors, the Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, and Dixon himself.

I had a little red rooster
Too lazy to crow ‘fore day
I had a little red rooster
Too lazy to crow 'fore day
He kept ev’rything in the barnyard
Upset in every way (elsewhere recorded as “Eager settin’ a-ready to lay,” (picked up everything in the barnyard/either settled or ready to lay)

You know the dogs begin to bark
And the, the hounds
They begin to howl
You know the dogs they begin to bark
And the, the hounds
They begin to howl
You know my little red rooster’s gone
Know the little red rooster's on the prowl

(harmonica & instrumental)

Now, if you see my little red rooster
Somebody, please drive him home
Now, if you seen my little red rooster
Somebody, ple-eee-ase run ‘em home
There ain’t been no peace in the barnyard
Since my little red rooster been gone.


1929 Banty Rooster Blues (Patton)

I'm gonna buy me a banty, put him at my backdoor
I'm gonna buy me a banty, put him at my backdoor
So when he see a stranger a-comin’, he’ll flap his wings and crow

What you want with a rooster, he won't crow ‘fore day?
What you want with a rooster, he won't crow ‘fore day?
What you want with a man, when he won't do nothin’ he say?

What you want with a hen won’t, cackle when she lays?
What you want with a hen won’t, cackle when she lays?
What you want with a woman, when she won’t do nothin' I say?

Ah, take my picture, hang it up in Jackson wall
Ah, take my picture, hang it up in Jackson wall
Anybody asks you “What about it,” tell 'em “That's all I saw”

My hook’s in the water, and my cork’s on top
My hook’s in the water, and my cork’s on top
How can I lose, Lord, with the help I got

I know my dog anywhere I hear him bark
I know my dog anywhere I hear him bark
I can tell my rider, if I feel her in the dark


1936 If you see my rooster (please drive him home) (Memphis Minnie)

f you see my rooster
Please run him on back home
If you see my rooster
Please run him on back home
I haven't found no eggs in my basket
Since my rooster been gone

I heard my rooster crowing
This morning just about the break of day
I heard my rooster crowing
This morning just about the break of day

I guess that was the time he was making his getaway
I just found out how come my hens won't lay
I just found out how come my hens won't lay
Every time I look around my rooster have done gone away

Now play it, Bob
Tell me 'bout my rooster

I've got too many hens
For not to have no roosters on my yard
I've got too many hens
For not to have no roosters on my yard
And I don't know what's the matter
Something have done got 'em barred

Now, Bob, if you see my rooster
Please run him on back home
Now, Bob, if you see my rooster
Please run him on back home
I haven't found no eggs in my basket
Since my rooster been gone


jump version 1950 Little Red Rooster Edward and James Griffin Margie Day and the Griffin Brothers

Got a little red rooster and, man, how he can crow! (2x)
He's the boss of the barnyard any old place he goes.

He's a tiny little fella but he sure can strut his stuff, (2x)
And the way he loves me, man, he ain't no bluff.

If you want your red rooster and you want him all alone,
Just keep him off the road where these old hens like to roam,
'Cause your little red rooster may seem...(?),
But as soon as your back's turned, he'll make a fool of you.

If you got a good rooster, better clip his wings.
These old hens will get him and give him diamond rings.
Little red rooster, ain't gonna let him go.
I done clipped his wings; man, he can't fly no mo'.