Poe’s Plate Articles

     An often impecunious writer who depended on publication for his income, Edgar Allen Poe sometimes wrote with a quick payment in mind. Amid the great poems and stories in the Collected Works the reader will see four “plate articles.” These were short essays describing engraved plates the publisher had already obtained. Apart from being expected to come up with something with broad popular appeal, the writer had a free hand. Thus these pieces, written to order like poems produced on a prompt at a workshop and tied essentially to the image they accompanied, could sometimes create the opportunity for an almost improvisatory composition, a sort of laboratory for creativity.
     They do not always fulfill this potential, though. The earliest of Poe’s plate articles, “Some Account of Stonehenge, the Giant’s Dance,” provides nothing but a factual description of the monument, including quotations from other writers both ancient and modern. His scheme allows very little space for the expression of Poe’s own sensibility. The flatness of the essay is evident in its banal concluding sentence: “The whole number of stones now visible, amounts to one hundred and nine.” The author was palpably anxious to finish up, turn it in, and get paid.
     By the time Poe was assigned another engraving, the result of the exercise was altogether different. The precious archaism of the word “fay” suggests the more self-indulgent style of Poe’s second such article, “The Island of the Fay.” Poe allowed himself a dramatic rush of words expressing a far more passionate and specific vision. His torrent of rhetoric however, is preceded by a sort of overture that might be considered its theoretical justification -- Poe’s sonnet beginning “Science, true daughter of old Time . . .” which indicts science for killing myth.
     He begins by quoting Marmontel to the effect that music is unique in that it may be best enjoyed alone, and proceeds to the quite simple next step of suggesting that to him the pleasures of admiring nature are likewise best pursued by a lone individual. Yet on the way to that point he tosses off a series of provocative propositions unrelated to what follows. In the very first sentence, in the middle in fact of Marmontel’s words, he throws into question the notion he has not even completed stating, saying that Marmontel speaks “with the same odd confusion of thought and language which leads him to give his decidedly equivocal narratives the title of ‘Contes Moraux.’” It may be called an “odd confusion,” but surely thought and language are always entangled. If they are entirely apart, would that not result in gibberish? If the French author is so “equivocal,” why cite him as an authority? But Poe’s American reader, concentrating perhaps on the French, is likely to slide forward past these diversions toward what seems likely to be the chief theme of the essay: the delectation of natural beauty.
     By the end of the article’s first paragraph the love of nature has gone far beyond a conventional picturesque sketch. It becomes a vision of the ancient rocks and mountains, the world itself, and the cosmos beyond as a vast organism upon which humans dwell as “animalculae” do upon our own bodies, and we are as ignorant of these great beings as the microbe – not on our skin in Poe’s imagining – but “those which infest the brain ” -- is of our own reality.
     He is only just warming up. Like a Hindu cosmographer, he goes on to conceive of “cycle within cycle without end – yet all revolving around one far-distant center which is the Godhead.” There is very little here of the scenic and pretty, no reference whatever to the engraving accompanying the piece, yet the reader does find the most effective demonstration possible of the heights to which an inspired solitary observer might rise. The true center of the essay seems to be the thrill of extravagant speculation.
     The remainder of the piece is devoted to natural description, albeit heavily colored with subjectivity, of a ramble among “melancholy tarns” of the area. There he says he felt like falling into a “doze” beneath an almost narcotic “unknown odorous shrub,” thinking that only by dreaming might he actually look upon the scene before him, “such was the character if the phantasm which it wore.” This comment, of course, leads the reader to question even the concrete details of passages like “The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and Asphodel-interspersed.”
     Whether the writer is awake or asleep, as night falls he glimpses the apparition of a fairy in a boat. Poe had notoriously maintained in “The Philosophy of Composition” that “the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” Thus the poor “fays” must not only be seen in the process of dying, but dying repeatedly: “rendering unto God their existence little by little” until the apparition is gone, or night has fallen or the dreamer has awakened.
     The castigation of science, then, with which the essay opens becomes profoundly ambiguous since, in an aestheticized analogue of Christ’s crucifixion, the decease of the divine is the moment of its greatest beauty. Just as with the beloved woman, it is the lover’s longing that is loveliest, not the object of his affection at all, and to bring that pathos to the greatest height, the fay must die.
     “The Island of the Fay” is an island in the mind. Far from the mundane appreciation of the natural beauty of trees, mountains, and lakes, Poe is looking for a meditation that will accommodate him to life on earth by fancifully transmuting what he sees. The first third of the article consists of ambitious mental exercises specifically designed to free the consciousness from mere observed reality and the remainder provides a vision of the divine at the moment of its vanishing, simultaneously indulging and denying the writer’s desire.
     In his third plate article “Morning on the Wisshiccon” Poe constructs a light burlesque of a similar theme of ambivalence and the veil of illusion. Beginning quite soberly, Poe suggests that foreign visitors to America miss the most beautiful sights because “the real Edens of the land lie far away from the track of our own most deliberate tourists,” in the wild back-country. He relates a journey of his own to such a remote region during which he “sank into a half slumber” dreaming of “ancient days.” In this condition he sees the noble elk featured in the plate posing atop a cliff. Yet the animal alone is not as beautiful as the animal with a sense of inevitable loss. “I fancied the elk repined . . .at the manifest alteration for the worse, wrought upon the brook and its vicinage, even within the last few years, by then stern hand of the utilitarian.” Imminent extinction lends the elk a patina of loveliness similar to the grace that descends on the dying woman.
     From this meditation, not so very different from the vision of the fay, he is suddenly roused by the appearance of a servant who feeds the animal which, it seems, though suggestive of an emblem of the aboriginal untouched wilderness, was a pet, a domestic animal. After the opening which declared that English tourists never see the real wild America, it seems this vestige of aboriginal fauna is kept by “an English family.” Thus the knot of contradiction is tightly tied. The joke is on the writer until the reader reflects that Poe had been in on it all along and the reader is the one he successfully strung along.
     For the last of his plate articles Poe was presented with an illustration of “Byron and Miss Chaworth.” The relationship of these two makes for him a model of noble true love. He opens with a quotation from George Sand (the name he uses is Mme. Dudevant) who, rather like Marmontel, he finds to mix “many an admirable sentiment” with “a chaos of the most shameless and altogether objectionable fiction.” She speaks of the purity of young love, and, according to Poe, Byron, who was, of course, notoriously promiscuous with men and women of all sorts, maintained the beauty of this relationship specifically because he and Miss Chatworth were never intimate after their youngest days. “It is better,” he says, “for the mere romance of the love-passages between the two [emphasis added], that their intercourse was broken up in early life.”
     Poe’s notion of love from afar as the highest love differs from its form in Jaufre Rudel, since for Poe the experience is deeply solipsistic. “It was born of the hour, and of the youthful necessity to love . . .It had no particular regard to the person, or the character, or the reciprocating affection of Mary Chatworth.” In fact, Poe enjoys thinking that to her Byron was “a somewhat portionless, somewhat eccentric and rather lame young man,” while to him she was “the Egeria of his dreams – the Venus Aphrodite that sprang, in full and supernal loveliness, from the bright foam upon the storm-tormented ocean of his thoughts.” Their love derives its power from the fact that it cannot be realized.
     While the piece on Stonehenge illustrates how, even for a writer as idiosyncratic as Poe, a restrictive journalistic assignment might produce routine hackwork, the other three articles prove that professional restrictions might also allow the writer the opportunity for rich rhetoric and soaring concepts. These essays elaborate in pathetic and comic strains Poe’s central themes: the superiority of imagination over reality, and in particular the supreme value of a sublime love as a wholly mental phenomenon for which an unreal object serves better than a real, and for which the impossibility of satisfaction is a paradoxically essential factor. In the end, as in his stories in general, his true focus is the nervous subjectivity of the restless creative mind, enjoying itself in the cosmic flights of the “island of the Fay,” deceiving itself in the cause of the Romantic in “Morning on the Wisshiccon,” and glorifying ethereal unrealized love in “Byron and Miss Chaworth.”

Planetary Motions

This post is a draft of the introductory essay to Planetary Motions, a collection of new poems whose publication (from Giant Steps) is scheduled for June.



The planets were so-called because the name signified in Greek “wanderers,” and Mars and Venus, unlike the fixed stars, seemed to ramble about aimless in the heavens. From a later heliocentric perspective, however, the movements of these heavenly bodies appear elegant and predictable. I can conceive a day that scientists might announce that Venus and the rest were vagabonding after all and the regularities the astronomers had reported were simply mirror images reflecting their own minds in their more rational, if operatically grand, moments.

My own course pretends to little design. The chaos theorists have shown, however, that systems lurk even in what is apparently arbitrary, and, of course, all patterns break up when viewed from a different angle or a slightly altered consciousness. How do I happen to dwell in this town? I simply find myself here. Why do I believe as I do? Because of everything that has come before. Course of study, course of life make little difference in the great tidal movements of mind which are likely in the end to resemble the slow unfolding of a tree’s shape over decades, the distribution of stars in the sky, or the histories of slugs and snails told in silvery mucus.

The boldest claim I would make for the driftings of the consciousness I know best is similar to that made by Marcus Aurelius for what he saw before him on the table: “some splits appear in the crust of baking bread, and these have nothing to do with the baker’s plan, yet these have always a certain rightness.” A rightness like that of the shore-marks of the sea’s waves, or the undulations wrought in the Sahara’s sands by wind, or the swirls and stripes on my tabby’s back.

These things, though, are untouched by intention, so a work of art represents always its object, not only transformed by the conventions of human senses and brains, but then further shaped by desire, fear, and vision. Poetic events, like those observed on the quantum level, come into existence only when observed.

Everything is a matter of aesthetics in the end. Ethics requires defining what sort of a person one would find it becoming to be. Viciousness is quite simply ugly. My ideologies resemble my home’s interior decoration though the former are more easily portable. Each person constructs a nest of what seems right and judges others for their taste rather than their ratiocination, and this procedure is quite in order for we know what we like and must settle for that as a human sort of Truth. Poems and other forms of art are naked about this. As Sidney said, the “Poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” A few hundred years later, Keats called a similar willingness to suspend “any irritable reaching after fact and reason” Negative Capability. A millennium and a half earlier another writer with medical training, Sextus Empiricus, had recommended ἐποχή, withholding judgement on all issues, as the likeliest path to serenity.

Lacking a destination might seem to some to entail lacking a purpose, yet, though miles behind, I would like to think that I follow the footsteps of Fa Yen who, when he declared that he was on a pilgrimage without a destination, wandering without goal, was assured by master Kuei Ch'in that such undirected movement was exactly right whereupon Fa Yen attained enlightenment. I can promise no such reward, only a few snapshots of consciousness reflecting glints of shattered truth which I wave in the dark like a blessedly naïve child with a sparkler the bright lights of which provide a sort of promise in spite of their evanescence. Looking then down, a crystal ball is surely available in the reflections and refractions of every puddle in the gutter!






This story I paraphrase is case 20 of the Cóngróng lù, or Book of Equanimity by Wansong Xingxiu, in Japanese called the Shōyōroku.

The Primacy of Poetry in Sidney’s Defence

     The crisis in the prestige of poetry that occasioned Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie [1] is far more evident in contemporary society, Timely though his theme may be, his concept of poetry is an obstacle for modern readers’ sympathetic reception of his essay. To him a part of the grandeur of poetry is that the word may be stretched to embrace all work of imagination. His emphasis on art’s role in fostering morality, quite out-of-place for many modern readers, further raises the barrier. Though the author adopted the pose, fashionable in his day, of pitying “the evill luck” that might bring a reader “to read this inck-wasting toy of mine,” his essay contains an original and persuasive theory of verbal art featuring a sophisticated understanding of mimesis that goes beyond the ideas inherited from Plato and Aristotle to anticipate elements of semiotic theory.
     Sidney’s essay opens with a lament for the decline in poetry’s position. “Poetrie,” he complains “from almost the highest estimation of learning, is falne to be the laughing stocke of children.” Today poetry is generally ignored. Sidney’s own practice indicates that in his day, poetry retained sufficient cachet to be a required skill for courtiers, whereas today poetry has fallen further yet to the extent that competence in the art, even as a consumer and even among the educated, is rare today. [2] A poet-politician would in modern American society be a freak.
     Sidney describes accurately the paramount position of poetry in traditional societies. For him the ancient Greeks provide the most convincing evidence. He says that they considered poetry “above all names of learning.” In part this prestige is associated with the idea of poetic inspiration and poets’ “prophetic” role, but it also assumes an obsolete broad definition of poetry. To Sidney and to the ancients, poetry could mean all imaginative intellectual work, including not only prose works and philosophy but science as well. From poetry, he says, “other learnings have taken their beginnings.” Thus for him, not only is Homer a poet, so are Heliodorus the author of a prose romance, Herodotus the historian, and Manilius the astronomer.
     Sidney, however, distinguishes poetry from other forms of knowledge which have external objects, claiming that poetry is “directed to the highest end of the mistress-knowledge, by the Greeks called archetektonikē.” For Aristotle the coordinating “master art” is politics, because it orders the affairs of humans with artful design setting out social organization and ethical imperatives with the aim of the good of all. [3] Sidney, however, names the poet as “moderator” of “the school of learning.”
     Thus poetry holds the executive function overseeing all sorts of learning of which “the finall end is, to lead and draw us to as high a perfection, as our degenerate soules made worse by their clay-lodgings, can be capable of.” To Sidney both producing and consuming intellectual and artistic work make a person at once more human and more divine, more excellent in general, and certainly more moral.
     An authoritative reference work quotes Northrup Frye’s devastating judgement on literature’s ethical value. “Any attempt to align [art] with morality, otherwise called bowdlerizing, is intolerably vulgar” [4] though the same source calls the relevance of ethics to literary criticism the issue “with the most sustained written tradition” in all of literary history. [5] Sidney would have thought he was expressing a simple and generally accepted commonplace when he defined poetry by moral parameters, saying “that faining notable images of vertues, vices, or what els, with that delightfull teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a Poet by.”
     Indeed, the encouragement of morality can sound like the principal role of art.


“For these indeed do meerly make to imitate, and imitate both to delight & teach, and delight to move men to take that goodnesse in hand, which without delight they would flie as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodnesse whereunto they are moved: which being the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed, yet want there not idle tongues to bark at them.”


     The proposition that literature fosters good behavior is not only uncongenial to modern critical thinking in theory; it is hardly supported by the irregular reputations of not a few poets or the simmering gossip in certain university English departments. [6]
     Sidney’s lofty principles were in part partisan, of course. He was writing in reply to Stephen Gosson's The Schoole of Abuse. Yet he seems to undercut his own claims about poetry’s ennobling effects with the opening in which he cites Pugliano‘s verbal praise of horsemanship as his model. [7] This inspiration may seem to trivialize poetry, reducing it to the status of a long list of other courtly accomplishments, but such a judgement is anachronistically anti-feudal. While the association seems to moderns to put poetry on a par with ruffled collars and the like, to Sidney (under the tutelage of Castiglione) the aristocrat sought to exemplify genuine excellence in every way. Just as a Victorian author implies a socio-aesthetic standard in calling ethical behavior “gentlemanly,” or, more simply, “manly,” to an Elizabethan high birth was associated with high-mindedness.
     Poetry is not, however, for Sidney purely didactic, a “medicine of cherries” in his phrase. Ironically, in part due to his being borne aloft by his Renaissance neo-Platonism, Sidney overcame the reductive identification of art with imitation that led Plato to belittle poetry as “an imitation of an imitation.” Declaring “Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth,” Sidney discards any simple notion of mimesis, suggesting a more sophisticated semiosis, a refracted reality centered in the poet’s imagination which is, in fact, distinct from the world itself though always linked to it.
     In this way he finds Xenophon’s literary picture of Cyrus, a historical figure, while not “wholly imaginative” to be “another nature,” an original creation resembling divine creation. Deviations from perceived reality are no deficiency but rather poetry’s particular glory. Because of such non-imitative elements, the artist’s work is enabled to be “either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite a new, formes such as never were in nature.” Escaping “the narrow warrant of her [Nature’s] gifts,” the poet is capable of “freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit.”
     For Sidney, though, this increase in verbal power comes not from the generalizing of all Cyruses into a Platonic form of Cyrus, but in particularity of the artist’s design. “Let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, killing and whipping sheep and oxen, thinking them the army of Greeks, with their chieftains Agamemnon and Menelaus, and tell me if you have not a more familiar insight into anger, than finding in the schoolmen his genus and difference.”
     While not contradicting the mimetic principle he inherited, Sidney is careful to expand it for his own analysis. “Poesie therefore, is an Art of Imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth to speake Metaphorically.” Immediately after affirming his authority, he introduces new terms that suggest his view of poetry conceived in the poet’s imagination. A “re-presentation” goes beyond a “presentation,” a “counterfeit” is etymologically, something made “in opposition” to a model, and, most significantly, “to speake Metaphorically” is quite different from speaking literally. This non-imitative shift moves the poet’s image from realism to something greater. For Sidney, poetry is man’s distinctive capacity, the activity in which he displays his divinity more than in any other.
     The value of metaphor is that it can offer rich and precise objective correlatives for experiences, conveying them with far more information than other forms of discourse. One way in which poetry is distinguished from other forms of discourse is by its affective component. Poets are “Fathers in learning” generally, but they are alone in possessing “hart-ravishing knowledge.” While non-aesthetic texts usually allow scant expression of emotion, poetry often foregrounds feelings, and to Sidney, “moving is of a higher degree than teaching.”
     Sidney rejoins Aristotle in asserting poetry’s privilege over history, imagination over facts, metaphorical meaning over literal. The potential of poetry arises in the first place from the ability of the author to construct a work that reflects, not the appearance of things, but their meaning, their significance, including the associated emotions. This total picture untethered to observed facts corresponds to the true greater reality of human experience which includes not only subtle shades of insight that might escape the gross terms of literalism, but also allows the inclusion of self-reflection, ambivalence, contradiction, tension, and mystery as well as that unique variety of pleasure called beauty.




1. So-called in Posonby’s authorized first edition (1595). It had been titled An Apologie for Poetrie in Olney’s earlier printing. While I shall use the title Sidney apparently preferred, I recognize the advantage of Olney’s title because of its distinction from Shelley’s equally celebrated A Defence of Poetry.

2. Even in academic departments the study of relatively recent fiction has, to a unprecedented extent, displaced poetry.

3. Nicomachean Ethics I.2.

4. Frye was, of course, a devout Christian. Note how even his denunciation of morality’s claims on art is cast in aesthetic terms. The comment occurs in Fearful Symmetry, p. 121 in the Collected Works edition.

5. “Ethics and Criticism” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

6. It is likely true that literary critics and scholars are more righteous in that they are inclined to the left politically, but this is not likely due to their specific training, but rather is characteristic of all educated people.

7. Sidney’s Defence is itself cast in the most classical form of an oration. A detailed description of his debt to Quintilian and Cicero appeared in Kenneth O. Myrick’s Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman. A more recent study is John Webster’s “Oration and Method in Sidney's ‘Apology’: A Contemporary's Account,” Modern Philology 79.1 (Aug., 1981), 1-15.

Art and Life in the Haight Ashbury

     Doubtless the most prominent elements of the artistic legacy of the youth movement of the 1960s are the psychedelic rock music of bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead, the innovating cartoon work from Zap and others, and the graphic design of the concert posters and the underground press, notably the pioneering Oracle.
     The Haight Ashbury itself produced few memorable paintings or sculptures and relatively little of lasting literary value in part because hip artists in the center of the scene sought to make life as a whole into art with street theater, extravagant costumes, community-based music, and a slyly ironic argot. Though the Beat poets had formed the best-known segment of the hip movement during the fifties and several of their principal representatives, born between 1919 and 1935, [1] read at the first Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park Polo Grounds in January of 1967, the culture of the Haight-Ashbury was far less productive of lasting literary monuments than that of North Beach had been.
     The ambition to make everything an objet d’art naturally led to a paucity of distinct objets d’art. The widely shared goals of enlightenment and the transformation of American culture were inconsistent with aesthetic experience as a unique sort of consumption marked off, indeed exalted, by its separation from everyday life and often associated with the privileged. Along with the resistance to limiting art to self-consciously produced objects for a specialized marketplace came a democratic reluctance to glorify a few “geniuses” whose names are a sort of commercial brand and to cultivate anonymous art and art for free in which professional ambitions had no relevance at all. [2]
     Nonetheless the Diggers, the leading formation of the Haight-Ashbury scene, had emerged from earlier literary publications such as Beatitude and Underhound and other specifically artistic formations such as R. G. Davis’ San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Artists Liberation Front. They produced written texts from the beginning. As the Haight neared its crest, The Communication Company, with Claude Hayward and Chester Anderson at its center, assumed the task of publishing for the collective as members of a movement rather than as individual artists or advocates for strictly aesthetic values. Building on the legacy of the Digger Papers that had already appeared, the Communication Company printed hundreds of handbills as well as works of poetry by Richard Brautigan, Michael McClure, and Lew Welch.
     Having acquired “one brand-new Gestetner 366 silk-screen stencil duplicator” and “one absolutely amazing Gestefax electronic stencil cutter,” “Chester & Claude” announced the Communication Company with a manifesto titled “Our Policy.” The document, though printed on new equipment, has a makeshift appearance that reinforces its message. Across the top is inscribed The Communication Company in a hand that betrays nothing of art school polish. Beneath are detailed the group’s goals in a stencil made from a manual typescript, including a section headed “our plans and hopes,” of which only one of the twelve was explicitly (if vaguely) artistic: “to publish literature originating within this new minority.”
     Yet even this ambition is couched in terms associated with radical politics. The use of the term “minority” is surely influenced by the dawning of black consciousness with its demand for the publication and study of African-American writers. The implication can only be that hip writers, like members of ethnic subcultures, have their own experience couched in a unique rhetoric, and that the Communication Company could serve a role in the dissemination of this particular vision parallel to that of, say, the Third World Press of Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti).
     This collectivist emphasis questions the egocentric focus of Romantic theory with its fondness for the “genius” and privileging of individual vision, though it resembles in part such models as IWW culture, Dada, and Situationism and draws from the evolving forms of conceptual and performance art. The first of the “plans and hopes” of the new publisher, however, far from referring g to any of these precedents, is simple: “to provide quick & inexpensive printing service for the hip community.” In the first instance this meant “to print anything the Diggers want printed” and “to do lots of community service printing.” They hope in the way “to function as a Haight/Ashbury propaganda ministry” in the form of a new sort of journal “to supplement The Oracle with a more or less daily paper.” [3] They hoped thereby to counteract the straight press, what they called “The Chronicle’s fantasies.”
     Yet their language suggests that pursuing these goals would require language other than the journalistic norm. Seeking “to compete with the Establishment press for public opinion” would require their being “outrageous pamphleteers,” and “to produce occasional incredibilities out of an unnatural fondness for either outrage or profit, as the case may be.” In the end, the individualist impulse survived with the penultimate ambition “to do what we damn well please,” followed only by a reminder of the reality principle: “to keep the payments up” on the printing equipment.
     Though the authors of “Our Policy” allowed themselves a theoretically unlimited license to fiction and betrayed a fondness for provocation, their aim was congruent with that of the Diggers as a whole: to contribute toward defining, fostering, and protecting the hip youth movement as a whole. Anything less would have struck them as “Art as a fantasy pacifier,” in the words of the handout “Trip Without A Ticket.” This manifesto may be fairly taken to represent the most fully formed statement of the artistic ideology of the Haight, having been originally printed by the Diggers as a whole and then in part revised and later reprinted by the Communication Company.
     “Trip Without A Ticket” compares Americans to psychiatric patients, stupefied by tranquilizing drugs, sleepwalking through the horror of modern life, in desperate need of awakening, of “the single circuit-breaking moment that charges games with critical reality.” Without “the cushioned distance of media” people would cease to be the programmed “normals” required by the status quo and would be transformed into “life-actors” capable of seeing through the culture’s “consumer circuses” and feeling real rapport with the victims of American imperialism.
     The central form through which such eye-opening may occur is theatrical. To create “a space for existing outside padded walls” entails the elimination of the conventional theater building as well as the psychiatric unit. Art becomes an escape plan, with dramatic actions enacted in the everyday world rather than plays behind a proscenium arch, actions that function as “glass cutters for empire windows,” depending on the “universal pardon for imagination” that underlies “the intrinsic freedom of theater.” Only such a new “guerilla” theater can create “life-actors” and generate “a cast of freed beings.” In sum they aimed at establishing a “theater of an underground that wants out” aiming “to liberate ground held by consumer wardens and establish territory without walls.”
     In this way any location “that is free becomes a social art form. “Ticketless theater. Out of money and control.” Several vignettes illustrate precisely what this might look like in practice. “A sign: If Someone Asks to See the Manager Tell Him He's the Manager.”
     “Someone asked how much a book cost. How much did he think it was worth? 75 cents. The money was taken and held out for anyone. "Who wants 75 cents?" A girl who had just walked in came over and took it.”
     Not only is there no ticket; there is as well no script and no barrier between audience and performer. Clearly calling for participatory improvisatory theater set on the stage of the world, this is art without artifacts, beauty carved from the circumstances of everyday life, symbolic action that implies a new world view. With this vision the flotsam of unwanted surplus goods in the Free Store and in the world is transmuted into the tools by which liberation becomes available. “Fire helmets, riding pants, shower curtains, surgical gowns and World War I Army boots are parts for costumes. Nightsticks, sample cases, water pipes, toy guns and weather balloons are taken for props.” The magic appears when the cash nexus is removed. “When materials are free, imagination becomes currency for spirit.”
     Citing Gary Snyder on the necessity to “pin down what's wrong with the West,” the “Trip” finds models for such community-based ritual not so very distant from California. The specific mythic meaning of the original ritual is less important than the involvement in the moment and attentiveness to the constant stream of sensory detail.
     
"The Mexican Day of the Dead is celebrated in cemeteries. Yellow flowers falling petal by petal on graves. In moonlight. Favorite songs of the deceased and everybody gets loaded. Children suck deaths-head candy engraved with their names in icing."

     A parallel imagistic flow follows with the scene translated into the terms familiar to the Haight.


"A Digger event. Flowers, mirrors, penny-whistles, girls in costumes of themselves, Hell's Angels, street people, Mime Troupe.
Angels ride up Haight with girls holding Now! signs. Flowers and penny-whistles passed out to everyone.
A chorus on both sides of the street chanting Uhh!--Ahh!--Shh be cool! Mirrors held up to reflect faces of passersby."


     The hip community was influenced by a number of modern trends in art including improvisation, chance, collaboration, found objects, and street art, yet the most characteristic work that arose from the Haight-Ashbury eschewed the pretty in favor of the illuminating. The Haight Ashbury ethos favored the collective expression of the neighborhood and the movement as a whole to the promotion of individual art egos. The very fact that we have few works of poetry or fiction that fully embody the spirit of the age itself embodies the Haight Ashbury ethos. In order to recover some sense of what art meant in that time and place it is necessary to study the ephemera, and central to any such understanding must be the publications of the Diggers and the Communication Company.



1. Ferlinghetti (born in 1919), Ginsberg (1926), Gary Snyder (1930), Kandel (1932), McClure (1932), and Brautigan (1935) all read. The younger generation was represented by rock musicians.

2. The Cockettes founded by Hibiscus in 1969 insisted that one needed no talent whatsoever to perform. The associated Kaliflower Commune was exceptionally long-lived with related individual and groups active today.

2. Anderson was born in 1932, Hayward was younger, born in 1945.

3. Comparable to the daily publications from the Sorbonne’s École des Beaux-Arts in the spring of 1968 and the Occupy Wall Street Journal in 2011.

Notes on Recent Reading 40 (Saunders, Adichie, Radhakrishnan)

Lincoln in the Bardo (Saunders)

     For all its idiosyncratic form, the novel seems deeply conventional in theme, including a happy ending with Willie and the crew of deads making the right choice at last and the president turning his mind away from his consuming grief. In a lesser way, the racial theme struck me as quite reductive as well as anachronistically modern. Apart from that dissonance the multiple voices of the spirits seemed a wasteful and intrusive device as they at times served only to narrate and seemed often interchangeable, finishing each other’s phrases. Even worse was the mingling of genuine and newly composed historical sources. I suppose critics have sorted them out, but I cannot see the point of the exercise.
     It was entertaining to hear the various voices on those exchanges in which they were differentiated, and Saunders is certainly capable of some well-turned poetic phrases, but the attention the book has attracted strikes me as misplaced. It is basically a book with a gimmick.


Americanah (Adichie)

     Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s third novel, is a substantial (five hundred pages) and accomplished narrative. Having established the relationship between Ifemelu and Obinze during the opening expository chapters, the romance is then held in suspense for much of the story while Ifemelu experiences an American immigrant’s odyssey. The ending is abrupt, and the reader suspects that Ifemelu’s impulsiveness will surely lead to further complications. The book could be an effective soap opera, in fact, moving from one unsatisfactory love relationship to another.
     Love is not the focus, however. The book has in fact the same center as the protagonist’s blog, that is, the life of Nigerians in the USA or, even more precisely, the reactions of white Americans to Nigerians. Though Africans are not spared Adichie’s satiric thrusts, the book is first of all a non-American black person’s experience of race in the U.S.A. While the Africans, like the main character, are struggling, seeking material security, many of the white Americans she encounters are affluent liberals. The fierce racism of working-class Americans finds as little a place in Adichie’s world as the attitudes of traditional and poor Nigerians.
     One need not agree to think it salutary to hear the opinion of the supercilious Senegalese who maintains that he would never eat either McDonald’s or a cookie. Whether true or not, it is stimulating to be told that Africans do not appreciate the charm of old buildings but prefer everything new because they know that the future is theirs while Europeans and American fancy historic preservation because they know their best days are past. Hmm.

The value of such exposure emerges when I cannot consider strictures in these comments (the book is undisciplined, loose and overlong, overdetermined, with multiple exempla of every thematic point) without wondering if I, the white person, were being condescending, committing what is today called microaggression. On the other hand, were I to praise her to the skies, I would be like the comfortable though slightly ridiculous suburbanites who think all dark and poor people are beautiful. In this way identity politics, once a necessary and liberating force, can disable criticism. (Indeed it has nearly done so in many influential places.)
     The author has won the Booker prize, a MacArthur Grant, and virtually every other prestigious award. Like every other African writer seeking an international reputation, she relies on white approval, and, like many other readers of English, I find a particularly rewarding sort of DuBoisian double consciousness in such writers as her, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
     I suppose these musings indicate that the narrative has proven its worth, and the fact that it is an engaging story makes it a readerly pleasure as well.


Indian Philosophy (Radhakrishnan)

     For the non-specialist this grand two-volume set is surely still the best account of the ancient and sophisticated Indian philosophical tradition which flourished alongside equally vigorous mythological and devotional writing. The author was the first Indian professor at Oxford and knows how to address a sympathetic European readership. He is adept, for instance, at providing European parallels for South Asian developments. His study like all broad surveys is stronger in some areas than others, and he has his own biases – for instance, his preference for a Vedantic Advaitism -- but these volumes fill an essential role for Westerners of all opinions and doubtless for a good many Indians as well. If nothing else Radhakrishnan has provided a useful reference work that includes all major and many minor thinkers with a good index to boot.

Every Reader's Sidney

This is the twelfth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In this series I limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. The general introduction to the series titled “Why Read Poetry?” is also available on this site.



     Sir Philip Sidney would very likely to be surprised if he found from his perch in Elysium that his reputation in the twenty-first century rests securely on his writing. Child of a prominent and powerful family, he became a Member of Parliament at the age of eighteen and later undertook diplomatic missions for Queen Elizabeth, participating in the social, political, and military responsibilities of court life until dying from combat wounds at the age of thirty-one.
     The legends surrounding his demise are significant whether or not they are literally true. Sidney was said before the battle to have voluntarily put off his thigh armor when one of his men lacked such protection and then, dying, he was reported to have refused water, saying that another injured man had greater need.
     His reputation in life was as the perfect courtier – he was said to carry on his person Castiglione’s manual detailing the ideal nobleman’s accomplishments, including not merely the martial arts of horse and sword, but, in addition, expertise in sports, dancing, music, poetry, drawing and witty conversation. The courtier should have mastered all these activities to such an extent that he may display his skills with an air of nonchalance or spezzatura.
     Perhaps in part due to the desire to achieve that studied indifference, Sidney called literature his “unelected vocation” and claimed he had “slipt into the title of a Poet” by some “mischance.” His casual attitude and full-time profession in court did not prevent his popularizing the sonnet sequence in English and writing the most significant theoretical critical essay of his day. His literary eminence should not, however, cause the reader to forget that he wrote because an elegant sensibility, a grand capacity for love, and a cultivated artistic sense were for him among the noblest ornaments of humanity, more exalted but hardly different in kind from expertise in hawking, sports, and dancing .
     Sidney’s sequence Astrophil and Stella, like those of Petrarch before him and a good many since, focuses on love as the most profound human experience. Yet, as in the work of other poets, a self-reflective turn often diverts the topic to poetry itself. The opening poem, indeed, the opening line, sets these themes.


Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay:
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”


     Anatomizing love like a Renaissance scientist, he opens by insisting on the poem’s fidelity to his lived experience. His amorous desire motivates his pen with the hope that his beloved will receive his poem with the twofold Horatian response: delight and instruction. We are here in the late crest of courtly love in which romance uplifts both parties spiritually while maintaining a real base in physical attraction. The lover rises toward the ideal skies through the selflessness of love while his suffering, like that of Jesus, is redemptive and may stimulate grace.
     Portraying himself in the position of those male birds who perform the most elaborate courtship rituals, the poet considers how most effectively to use his verbal skills to appeal to the lady. He considers earlier writers for whom “wit” might be an important design element, but concludes that he can make no progress in that path, hot (“sunburned”) as he is and tongue-tied. In a sudden and dramatic trope, he then describes himself as pregnant with poetry, indeed, giving birth. Feeling “spite,” and struggling with his own pen, he concludes that sincerity is his only route. “’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’”
     An avowedly sincere statement of passionate love, the poem powerfully expresses the energy of eros. However, with the ambiguity of art and of the human psyche, many other readings lurk just behind the first. While the author appears to be helpless and suffering, beseeching the favor of a dominant woman, the Elizabethan world was a patriarchy in spite of the powerful rule of the queen. Like many sixteenth and seventeenth century love poems, the poem could be read as cynical seduction technique or as a ritual enactment of a pose for artistic value alone, unrelated to any actual relationship or emotion.
     Further, the claim of sincerity is such a common and ancient rhetorical figure that its use in a paradoxical way, calls attention to the artificiality, the literariness of the text. The writing of sonnets was a hallmark of the aristocracy and if Sidney was an outstanding exemplar, he was no different in kind from Thomas Wyatt and Sir Walter Raleigh. He could thus be expected to produce just such a poem whether it had any relationship – direct, ironic, or refracted – to his personal life.
     Even the simplest love lyric from Sidney’s pen bears the marks of learned tradition so valued in the poet’s time. His “Ditty,” the very title of which suggests an occasional piece tossed off in a moment of emotion, was cited on Puttenham’s authoritative Art of English Poetry as an example of the rhetorical figure epimone, or the repetitive statement of the same proposition.

MY 1 true-love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for another given:
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss,
There never was a better bargain driven:
My true-love hath my heart, and I have his. 5

His heart in me keeps him and me in one,
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:
He loves my heart, for once it was his own,
I cherish his because in me it bides:
My true-love hath my heart, and I have his.

His heart his wound received from my sight,
My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;
For as from me on him his hurt did light,
So still methought in me his hurt did smart:
Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,
My true-love hath my heart and I have his.


     The poet keeps circling about his point obsessively, replicating the dizzy motions of a lover’s mind but also dazzling his courtly audience with his ingenuity. The third stanza, emphasizing the “hurt” and “wound” of love, did not appear in the first printing of this song-like work, but was added when the lyric was inserted into Sidney’s highly rhetorical prose romance the Arcadia as though to prove the writer could still turn his figure another few times like a juggler putting another object in the air after it seemed he had reached the maximum possible.
     Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella contains a hundred and eight sonnets, approaching love from a variety of angles, for the most part all familiar from earlier poetry. Since Ovid, sleeplessness had been a conventional characteristic of the lover, and in Sonnet 39 Sidney apostrophizes Sleep, asking for amelioration of his love-longing.


Come Sleep, O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof shield me from out the press
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw;
O make in me those civil wars to cease;
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light;
A rosy garland, and a weary head;
And if these things, as being thine by right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella’s image see.


     He begins by Invoking Sleep with words of general application, tossing off metaphors like a magician producing flowers from the air. Some of these blooms provide the modern reader with the opportunity to observe a few archaic usages. (Perhaps instead of finding such temporary obstacles an annoyance, some can enjoy the glimpses through the centuries they offer.)
     “Knot of peace” works satisfactorily in a rapid read-through but it may puzzle the reader who pauses. The fact is that in Elizabethan times “knot gardens” were fashionable, formal herb garden with walks in geometric forms. Thus Sleep is figured as a pleasant and fragrant retreat where serenity might be available. The landscaping reference reinforces the treatment of love as a adjunct of the courtly life. “Bait” in Sidney’s day referred not to fish food alone but to human snacks, and thus a “baiting place” was a refreshing way-station, a café where the mind may renew itself.
     Following the most common formula for hymns and prayers, after calling the goddess Sleep, Sidney then makes his request. He asks for protection from depression, the “darts” of “Despair” which cruelly parody Cupid’s love arrows. Note his repetition of “shield,” first as noun, then as verb, a move which continues the rhetorical show. This figure was called antanaclasis by scholars, but the cleverness does not depend on the Greek name.
     The image of the poet assailed by missiles thrown by Despair introduces a theme of warfare which is then developed as the poet offers inducements to Sleep for support to end the “civil wars” within himself. The “tribute” with which the poet will repay Sleep for her favor are described in the last six lines. All but the last are the ordinary desiderata for rest: nice bedclothes, silence, darkness, fatigue, and “a rosy garland” (presumably to provide a bit of what today would be called aromatherapy). Confessing that these all belong to Sleep “by right,” he offers what is most precious to him: the image of his beloved which will surely appear in his dreams. Since the lover assumes that anyone would take the joy he does in her appearance, he expects this to be a compelling reward.
     Yet the entire drama is an artifice. His negotiation with Sleep for a sort of treaty occurs entirely in the imagination, providing a pretense that allows him to express the most extravagant compliments while depicting himself as the sensitive and helpless lover. Does Sidney mean what he says? Of course he does, but he means it as poetry. In his influential “Defence of Poetry” he argues that poetry uplifts people, making them more moral. He explicitly felt that the aesthetic cultivation required of the arts was an avenue toward nobility. The fact that he was thought such a paragon indicates both the acceptance of such theories in court and his impressive success in embodying the Elizabethan ideal.
     In a more general sense Sidney was an excellent example of what is meant by the expression “Renaissance man.” Known in his own day for his horsemanship and his participation in tournaments, for his witty conversation and elegant manners as well as for his diplomatic and advisory roles in government, he took an active interest as well in the most exciting advances of his day in science and navigation. Hakluyt dedicated his collection of accounts by English explorers to Sidney – indeed the fact that over forty works were dedicated to him is more a testament to his active interest in a wide variety of fields than to his power at court. He cultivated an acquaintance with the mathematician and astronomer John Dee, the artist Nicholas Hilliard, indeed with all those whom he admired regardless of their field.
     In this version of how a life should best be lived, poetry had a critical role as an index of sensibility. An aficionado of poetry was likely capable of mastering the other arts and being a proper lover, or at least of playing persuasive and moving tunes of love. Such self-cultivation, together with the active physical mastery of sports, horsemanship, the handling of a sword and other skills of war, defines an ideal with much to recommend it. Sidney added a robust intellectual appetite extending in all directions and a body of writing that retains its power centuries and half a world away from the poet’s Renaissance court.

O. Henry’s Novel Novel

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses to page numbers in the Penguin edition with introduction and notes by Guy Davenport.


     Cabbages and Kings, O. Henry’s only novel, is hardly a novel at all, but then his short stories are hardly short stories, either. Far from the “realism” widely practiced during his lifetime, O. Henry composed his work according to a structural standard which owes a debt to Edgar Allen Poe’s use of abstraction and rhetoric more than to Flaubert's realism. Thus, his trademark surprise endings ignore plausibility, preferring the formal maneuver of an ironic reversal. His themes are trivial, often commonplaces or forgettable sentimental emotion, often nothing more than the most available idées reçues, yet his work is entertaining, carefully crafted, and presents a consistent and original vision.
     Cabbages and Kings is a collection of short stories, presented as narrations by various characters who play a role in the story. Their tales are bound not just by a common cast, setting, and narrative frame; the central issue, more a mental puzzle than a dramatic conflict, is resolved only at the end, when the medium changes from raconteur story-telling suddenly to motion pictures, at that time nearly new. Just to require more ingenuity of himself and his clever readers, the author has added an apparently adventitious correspondence to Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Every addition is not so much part of a solution as it is a retarding of any solution at all. The author is a juggler whose audience gasps as he puts yet another object into the air.
     In the work as a whole one is never engaged by a central problem more momentous than a challenging crossword. One looks often in vain for psychological insight, absorbing specific detail, or moving emotion in O. Henry’s novel, often finding instead the most available and conventional thought. The same sort of patterning is observable on the smaller scale of the sentence. O. Henry’s favorite rhetorical device, the use of ironic semi-comic periphrasis, evident on every page of the novel, does not so much provide information useful for understanding as it makes wisecracks, abstracting the reader, making emotional identification unlikely, but allowing the intellectual delight of the author’s formal play. In both the work as a whole and a good many of its subsidiary units, the author is delaying the action, as one after another of the oddball characters take a turn, as throw-away one-liners fall this way and that from a marvelous almost hypnotic sparkler.
     It was such techniques that endeared the popular American author with the most advanced Russian Formalists. To critics such as Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Eichenbaum [1], William Sydney Porter, who churned out stories for the market, almost four hundred before his death at forty-seven, who published a story a week in the New York World’s spectacularly illustrated Sunday Magazine for over a year, was a literary avant-gardist. The theorists of the revolutionary Soviet Union applauded a writer who used racist expression less for promulgating white supremacy than for simple convenience.
     Abstraction is characteristic of much comedy, in which the protagonist is viewed as flawed by the normative reader. Characters reduced to a single trait in the Theophrastian sense are familiar from Menander through Jonson to Neil Simon, and Cabbages and Kings can boast no psychological development or complexity. The authorial tone is consistently acceptance and warm amusement. The general run of locals are terminally soporific in the most familiar sort of tropical stereotype, [2] though their leaders combine a similar idleness with rapacious avarice and the capacity for violence. The expatriates of Anchuria are likewise capable of combining phenomenal laziness with terrific greed, but as outsiders they are a bit more cautious about hedging their bets.
     Every now and then what seems a point of principle intrudes, though it may in fact be nothing more than the occasional absurd demands of ego. Such “actions generated by core beliefs” such as “Beelzebub” Blythe’s conscientious refusal to blackmail someone who is standing him drinks or Carolus White’s inability to do a portrait to order that falls short of his artistic ideals are likely to seem more peculiar than principled. In general, though, this is a land in which everyone is out for number one. Their selfishness is a fact of nature, like the Vesuvio Fruit Company’s exploitative domination of the land.
     In a comedy like Cabbages and Kings no real harm can come to anyone, so the reader may simply relax and make the most of the passing drolleries. Though occasionally a death may be mentioned, the reader’s sympathy is never engaged in the least. The linkages of the various narratives only emerge in the conclusion, the reader having been pleasantly suspended until that point (stymied perhaps more by the unlikeliness of the plot as by its brilliance). As in a whodunit mystery, the point of the plot is to remain concealed until the conclusion.
     Apart from the broad and comely design of the whole, the strongest element in O. Henry’s novel is the wit and ingenuity of his richly comic periphrases. The prose regularly erupts in jokes released like a string of slightly damp firecrackers. Yet none of the jokes advances the story. Each acts to delay and distract the reader, passing time, running out the clock, until the final curtain.
     For example, the story proper begins by setting the scene, yet it is less a scene from nature than it seems a motif of a tropical shirt or perhaps a neon barroom fantasy. “Coralio reclined, in the mid-day heat, like some vacuous beauty lounging in a guarded harem.” With details like “vacuous” and “guarded” irrelevant except to underline misogynistic conventions, O. Henry entertains his readers while they await anything likely to launch a storyline. In this Margaritaville “the palms waved their limber fronds foolishly like an awkward chorus at the prima donna’s cue to enter.” (9) Since this world is satirical, the dancers must be “awkward” and the prima donna doubtless acts the role of a comically temperamental diva of the sort portrayed in Mozart’s Der Shauspieldirektor.
     In his role as consul John Atwood discusses with a pair of entrepreneurs their plan to introduce the phonograph to Anchuria. He warns them that the locals, being “simple-hearted children of nature” (73) might react in one of two ways. “They may become inebriated with attention, like an Atlanta colonel listening to ‘Marching Through Georgia,’ or they will get excited and transpose the key of the music with an axe and yourselves into a dungeon.” (74) The series of moves, from the unlikely lexical choice of “inebriated” to the image of the Confederate officer, presumably apoplectic at hearing the Union anthem, then to the musical metaphor and the sudden rather Gothic axe and dungeon. It makes little sense – after all, both alternatives are hostile -- but it maintains an effervescent string of phrases, keeping the reader slightly off balance while suggesting the unpredictability of the plan.
     His method reliance on received ideas, in common with most comedy, is manifest. When Henry Horsecollar runs interference to free his own private co-conspirators from the threatening crowd of local conspirators by whom they are outnumbered, the rhetoric rises in a pyrotechnic display of racism.


"Then that cultured Red Man exhaled an arrangement of sounds with his mouth that made the Latin aggregation pause, with thoughtfulness and hesitations. The matter of his proclamation seemed to be a cooperation of the Carlisle war-whoop with the Cherokee college yell. He went at the chocolate team like a bean out of a little boy's nigger shooter. His right elbow laid out the governor man on the gridiron, and he made a lane the length of the crowd so wide that a woman could have carried a stepladder through it without striking against anything." (83)


     Even the very opening term here is twisted to the point of dizziness. Horsecollar, who has seemed as sensible as anyone else in the story and more admirable than many, had been introduced to Mellinger as an “Injun. Tame Injun” (75) to indicate that his presence would be inoffensive. Yet in this critical moment the success of this “cultured Red Man” does not depend on his social suavity but rather on an altogether savage utterance wild enough to paralyze his antagonists. It is yet unclear to what extent their craven abashment is due to their being not quite white themselves, but a “Latin aggregation.”
     Racist bomblets continue to detonate in the following phrases. A Carlisle war whoop is a ironic reference to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the federal government’s most important Native American educational institution for forty years, whose goal was total assimilation to mainstream American culture under founder Richard Henry Pratt’s slogan "Kill the Indian: Save the Man." Then, in a reverse use of racist stereotypes, the “Cherokee college yell” makes an ironic comparison between an indigenous barbarian and an American college football fan. Somehow the careless use of racial pejoratives proceeds to proliferate out of control. The Latin Americans are christened “the chocolate team,” a belittling tag predicting their lack of resistance in the face of the masterful Horsecollar who himself is oddly equated to “a bean out of a little boy's nigger shooter,” a phrase opening a nasty glimpse into nineteenth century Southern life (and into O. Henry’s readiness to make use of racist jocularity).
     O. Henry’s deft ear is attracted to such clichés and seeks sometimes to redeem them in better coin. To start the spin, a centuries-old proverb is put to the service of the most mercenary of interests: the Anchurian bureaucrats. “Spilled milk draws few tears from an Anchurian administration. Many are its lacteal sources; and the clocks’ hand forever point to milking time. Even the rich cream skimmed from the treasury by the bewitched Miraflores did not cause the newly installed patriots to waste time in unprofitable regrets.” (97) The reader can only sit back and watch as the author rings his changes on the topic of milk from the opening twist and the slyly pedantic slightly evasive “lacteal” through the effective image of graft and corruption as “milking time” to the dramatic climactic mention of “rich cream.”
     The national characteristics of Anchuria, while resting securely in racist stereotype, do convey some information about the Honduras that Porter came to know during his year residence there. The filibustering of private citizens and the neo-colonialism of the Vesuvio Fruit Company are indeed drawn from life. [4] The rapacious opportunism of individuals, institutions, and governments is a given, a subset really of the readiness of everyone in this fictional world to grab at the main chance. Meanwhile, though, until that big score arrives, all are satisfied with indolence, their ambitions daily delayed to make time for a drink and a sunset and some diverting conversation. In the last analysis, O. Henry’s theme is simple: “There is nothing doing now, let us tell a few stories before night falls.”
     Cabbages and Kings, indeed, may be said to be made up of such chatting. The experience of reading it offers pleasures not unlike those of the oysters as they enjoyed “a pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,/ Along the briny beach.”


The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'
   

     If the reader has been beguiled by the many conversations by the Coralian shore, as entertained, perhaps as the ingenuous mollusks, the denouement upon reaching the last page is not so final as theirs. To be devoured by O. Henry means no more than to relish passing a bit of time absorbed by the Vitagraphoscope [3] of his imagination.




1. See in particular the latter’s “O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story.”

2. Stereotypes may have their claims, of course. I recall entering more than one Nigerian office during the heat of the afternoon and finding half the workers dozing, heads on their desks.

3. The word Vitagraphoscope seems to be a neologism, perhaps compounding Vitascope, an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat and sold by the Edison Manufacturing Company, and Biograph, a film production and exhibition company founded by William Kennedy Dickson also in 1895. Dickson had broken from Edison.

4. Included in the long list of individual Americans (apart from U. S. military forces) who have meddled militarily in Latin America are William S. Smith, William Walker, William A. Chanler, Gregor MacGregor, and James Long. The Vesuvio corporation, of course, represents the United Fruit Company, which once dominated Honduras, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, leading to dictatorships of collaborators throughout the region and to such events as the violent repression of striking workers in Colombia in December of 1928 in which three thousand workers are thought to have been massacred.